Airco Caravan paints motel rooms that have played host to gruesome murders
I don’t care how nice the wallpaper or the lampshades may be, there’s something creepy about the stereotypical American motel featured in films, novels and plays. As if expressly to prove my point, artist Airco Caravan created a series called Crime Scene in which she paints the rooms that have previously played host to murders, suicides and accidental deaths.
It’s a dark starting point made all the more powerful by the banality of the rooms themselves; the gaudily coloured canvases are very sinister, and not only because the captions accompanying them are taken from newspaper reports of the crimes committed inside them. The two-dimensionality of Airco’s technique and the deliberately garish colour palettes bring a sense of theatricality to the commonplace furniture and interior decor, calling to mind scenes from Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, and ensuring I’ll never stay in a motel for as long as I live.
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Maisie joined It’s Nice That fresh out of university in the summer of 2013 as an intern before joining full time as an Assistant Editor. Maisie left It’s Nice That in July 2015.