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Over time, the Painted Rooms artists have demonstrated that “hotel room” as a concept evokes particular ideas for certain groups of people: travel, rest, the content of dreams, sex in a place apart from the day-to-day, aloneness within the confinement (or security) of four neutral walls, and, like Anthony Skirvin’s Unabomber room (307) and Owen Maigret’s dark-hued refuge: a place to hide out and plot your next move.
As you learn more about Maigret’s life, you begin to understand the impulses behind this dark refuge—complete with the beasts that remain on the brink of breaking in. A recent SF Weekly article charts his history from 90’s S.F. underground music scene player to his current mantle: champion of the little-known Panamanian roots of the hugely popular music style, reggaeton.
Maigret’s activism seems to pervade every aspect of his life; his blog topics range from the theft of original songs to illegal chemical spraying in Panama by the U.S. to his general anger toward the Bush administration. “As an official representative of the artist community, I can never be happy . . . and that is the truth,” he writes. The intermittent antedote to Maigret’s persistent darkness, which characterizes everything from his Painted Room to his MySpace page, appears to be “people who have the guts to be themselves.”
Not surprisingly, it’s a designation that fits Maigret well. Though Room 403 may not offer visitors a sweet-hued haven for pleasant dreams after a brisk tour of San Francisco, it promises to steep its guests in a bath of artistic honesty. In every aspect of his work, Maigret promotes the honor of struggle—and in his case, that could very well mean fending off a man with a mask and a bloody blade.
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