In Flyover States, Julian Whatley combines historical excavation with painterly precision to uncover what lies beneath the surface of the American landscape—both literally and metaphorically. The image draws on an 1879 wet plate photograph by John Hillers, taken during the U.S. Geological and Geographic Survey of the Territories. Originally used to promote westward expansion, these photos presented the land as untouched and uninhabited—propaganda in visual form. By reappropriating this source, Whatley reframes the terrain not as heroic frontier, but as a site of cultural erasure and environmental degradation.

The painting’s title—commonly used to dismiss the interior states of the U.S.—takes on layered meanings. It refers not only to the physical places that are overlooked from 30,000 feet, but also to existential and ecological “states” we choose not to confront: pollution, resource extraction, settler-colonialism, the psychological distance from the consequences of our modern lives.

Here, Whatley’s formal innovations intensify the conceptual payload. Transparent glazes—vinaceous, ochre, acidic greens—are laid over rough, monochromatic underpainting in the tradition of the Old Masters. This visual stratigraphy mirrors the geological strata of Canyon de Chelly’s “Spider Rock,” grounding the painting in both deep time and deep technique.

A jetliner streaks across the sky above, its contrail tinged with toxic pastel hues. What first appears as a benign act of transit resolves, with disturbing clarity, into an allusion to the 9/11 attacks. The jet’s trajectory echoes the silhouette of the spires, becoming a visual cipher for historical trauma. Below, a red-brown pond hints at industrial contamination, disrupting the illusion of sublime wilderness.

The use of overlapping geometric color fields—signature to Whatley’s Peripheral Space visual language—recalls Robert Irwin’s perceptual interventions. But here, instead of inviting transcendence, these colored windows frame denial, disconnection, and complicity.

In Flyover States, the land looks back at us—not with serenity, but with the weight of history and the slow-motion horror of climate collapse. This is landscape as palimpsest, as indictment, and as portal.