For decades, American culture has been dominated by the creative output of New York City and Los Angeles. Starting in the early 1950’s, with the post-war rise in American prosperity and the ready availability of commercial air travel, powerbrokers from the two coasts dubbed the rest of country “flyover” – something to look down upon while traveling between the places that really matter.

In Flyover, Christopher Pate’s first solo show at Jail Gallery, the Los Angeles-based, Idaho-bred artist nails the coffin shut on Art History 101 nostalgic notions of the triumph of mid-20th Century bicoastal culture.

In his paintings and works on paper, Pate riffs on prominently placed collage elements: vintage 1950’s and 1960’s maps, textiles and souvenir tablecloths from NYC and LA, by employing contemporaneous styles and/or imagery. In some cases, he leaves the resultant, willfully-retro works to stand on their own, like beautiful mutant found objects from another era, blissfully detached from history. In others, he goes further and adds the suggestion of physical decay to imply that the can-do, obliviousness of that time was a harbinger of today’s state of national malaise.

Christopher Pate's work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Cartelle Gallery and Roberts and Tilton, in the group exhibition Rogue Wave at LA Louver in 2001 and 2005 and in the 2007 LA Weekly Biennial.