DRIVE-BY-ART

various locations, East of Western
May 23-25, 2020
Los Angeles

DRIVE-BY-ART was organized by Warren Neidich, Renee Petropoulos, Michael Slenske and Anuradha Vikram and featured two locations, East and West of Western Avenue, over two weekends. Dubbed “Public Art in This Moment of Social Distancing,” all works were visible to the public from the safety and intimacy of their car or while passing by on foot or bike. Hubby created a new painting for her contribution to the show: ABRACADABRA. which she hung on a retaining wall that visible to traffic.

Hubby on her painting for the exhibition:

Warren (Neidich, the primary organizer of the show) reached out to me—we’ve known each since New York in the ‘90s, when we were both burgeoning art collaboration junkies. We’ve been in touch through the years and I’m thrilled to be involved in his brilliant art adaptation during the pandemic. I said yes immediately—I imagined it would be a refreshing shift of focus away from our current predicament as people seek out evidence of creative acts—a treasure hunt from the comfort of one's car.

I made a new work especially for this project. It’s a large neon painting depicting a recognizable, but perhaps not fully understood word: “ABRACADABRA.” Most associate it with magic tricks, but may not know that it was originally used for healing—dating back to the 2nd century. With the pandemic in mind, I painted the word repeatedly in its traditional triangular form, with one letter dropped from each successive line. The intention: as the word is repeated and reduced, so is the illness. If words can heal, may the most restorative ones be used for us now.