Working with sculpture and video, Yates’ ed work typically evokes a moment frozen in time, usually a tense moment of discovery and realization, encouraging the viewer to interact.
[4] Yates is known for his highly realistic miniatures that are experienced as physical objects; but because of their inaccessible scale, they can also be read as images.
[5] According to curator Marcie Bronson, Kevin Yates’s works are "at once familiar and strangely unsettling.
[7] As Gary Michael Dault writes in the Globe and Mail, "[Yates'] models scintillate with and are redeemed by a disturbingly lyrical sense of loss, both self and community.
Referencing both the outwash of natural disasters, the vagaries of climate change, and our relentless human tendency to move on, Yates's engulfed communities speak to impermanence - to the mystery of change.