Steve Yates
Steve Yates is a three-time Fulbright Scholar, photographer, printmaker, and curator who has exhibited around the United States and across Eastern Europe. Recent exhibitions include features at the National University of Art in Bucharest, Romania, Meno Parkas Gallery in Kaunas, Lithuania, and the Center of Contemporary Arts in Moscow. Steve’s works remain in the public collections of many major institutions such as San Francisco Museum of Modern Art,
The Academia Română in Bucharest, Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow, and Three Shadows Photography Art Centre in Beijing. Notably, he has been critically published in catalogues, books, and magazines such as the Cultural Observer and Diane Armatage.
The photographic prints created by Steve Yates are integrated with various printmaking techniques, as in he literally covers his photographs in ink. Such an effect leaves playful geometry and linearity flowing on the surface of imagery typically capturing scenes of nature or urban structures. These shapes, with their joyful colors, are reminiscent of the playfulness found by 20th century masters such as Paul Klee and Alexander Calder. The geometric ink splatters become spatial, without any sense of confrontation and using minimal application.
An integration of both photography and printmaking remains unusual and could be described as necessary to advance the visual arts. Integrative methods such as what Steve Yates achieves allows the viewer to reinterpret familiar subject matter in new, peculiar ways. Most notably, the photography depicting natural settings tends to be the most interesting in Steve’s portfolio because of the dichotomy between organic settings and human-created structures of bright-colored geometry. The aesthetic beauty and contradiction between natural, realistic coloring from the photography against minimalistic neon shapes has the viewer question the intrinsic value of illusory repudiation.
Waves to Monte Carlo (Le Baiser), artist proof 9 (pictured above) depicts crashing ocean waves against what seems to be a cliffside outside of the composition. Standing above, Steve captures the violent flood of water from above with the depiction of a magenta-red triangle printed on the corner of the photographic print. Small squiggly lines follow sporadically as if representing pixelated interference of a digital film. The artist applies the process of figurative and symbolic erosion onto the unseen shore impacted by the volatile waves of the ocean.
Steve Yates reflects a portfolio which enables integrative techniques which are vital to the advancements of the arts. Simply depicting imagery remains not enough for the contemporary eye, as artists like Steve must use combinative methods in order to create new visual iconography for consumption. He explores familiar subject matter with a new eye towards collaborating forms which represent both naturality and manufactured entities. The disjunction in Steve Yates work could be described as his most prominent feature as he explores methodology as an artform.
