My art is situated at the nexus of both my public and my community, and is marked by the interrelationship between process and materiality, thus integrating theory and practice. I have been actively investigating how an interdisciplinary approach could be most suitable for my subject matter, artistic concerns, and personal work methodology. As a result, I have taken into account the contexts I devise for my works in their distribution as a sight or as public sites, as critical components in the process of its
development.

My most recent work, spanning nearly eight years, includes installations and interventions. They have been structured to incorporate a search for complimentary and opposing voices within a questioning of community. While each of the pieces has a specific focus, I would say in general terms that one of the principal recurring themes within this body of work was the
examination of the social agency in the memorial forms, and the negotiation of power, control, and authority inherent in “Memory and History” constructions and their representations. The various frames taken within the different works create an awareness of the performance, sound, drawing, text or sculpture as a space of mediation between location and subjectivity, aesthetics and social engagement.

I found that in working within collaborative and small collective settings, I experienced the highest degree of challenge, exchange and depth of communication. Having had the opportunity to exhibit in artist-run centres across Canada, and to create works supported in part by this system, has allowed me to explore the relationship of context to content, and vice versa.

Most recently, I have been leaving room in my work for a mapping and exploration of boundaries which are inspired more directly by the raw material of my own life, including my ambivalence and anxieties about my own Jewish cultural heritage. This concentration adds yet another layer to the reading of my works, accompanying an understanding that stems from aesthetic, artistic, socio-political and economic concerns inherent in the work.

Devora Neumark, 1996