Airco Caravan paints motel rooms that have played host to gruesome murders

Date
23 October 2014

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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Airco Caravan: Fourteen Stab Wounds
The prime suspect in the the brutal slaying murder of a 38-old municipal employee was arrested on Saturday. The victim, who succumbed to 14 stab wounds in different parts of the body, was a former live-in partner of the suspect. She checked-in alone at Room 45 of the Mariposa Lodge III motel. 30 minutes later, a man also checked-in. As he left, the employees found the woman dead, lying in a pool of blood with multiple stab wounds.

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Airco Caravan: Boyfriend Held in Motel Killing
Police charged the boyfriend of a 23-year-old woman with stabbing her to death over the weekend at the Super 8 Motel where they had spent the night in Room 243. He was arraigned on a second-degree murder charge Monday night in the killing of his girlfriend who bled to death a day earlier from two stab wounds to her torso, police said. He is be held without bail at the Albany County jail.

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Airco Caravan: Fractured Skull
A man beat a handcuffed guest to death inside an Elkton motel, Room 418. Court records list a fractured skull as one of the many injuries that he suffered during a “mutual combat fight” that, at some point, turned into an alleged deadly assault. According to court records, the man continuously beat the victim in the head with the leg of a chair that had been broken during their fight.

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Airco Caravan: Lifeless Bodies of Two Children
Broke and jobless a woman killed her young sons in a Orangeburg motel, then strapped their lifeless bodies into their car seats before rolling the vehicle into a South Carolina river, authorities said. She drove to a motel with the two-year-old and 18-month-old boys. Late that night, in a corner room tucked at the back of the rundown, one-story motel complex, she suffocated the boys with her hands.

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Airco Caravan: Motel Slaying
King County prosecutors have filed murder charges against three 19-year-old men and a 16-year-old girl in connection in the slaying of a 47-year-old man. The sheriff’s office says witnesses saw the victim drive up and enter a room of SeaTac Motel. Within a few minutes they heard an argument and then a gun shot. The victim stumbled out of the room and collapsed. He died at the scene.

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Airco Caravan: Overdose
Two people were found dead in an Athens motel after what a sheriff’s investigator suspects was a “pill party”. A man in his 20s and a woman in her 30s were found dead at the Starlight Motel after investigators responded to a call from another hotel guest. A “pill party” involves mixed prescription medications passed around in a bowl. Investigators are waiting for lab results to determine the contents of the pills.

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About the Author

Maisie Skidmore

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.

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