The soon-to-be art gallery is a heap of drywall. The performance space is a pile of red velour seats, their backs nipped off, from the old Granada theater. The dressing room is currently doubling as the food-storage area, supplying those long nights of manual labor.
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The project began as the brainchild of Seth Green, poet, performance artist, filmmaker, and sound technician. As a member of the Oxygen Jukebox performance ensemble, he has spent the last decade or so developing his expertise in sound design, creating stunningly beautiful and complex scores. Last year, with his wife (now his ex). he decided to create his own sound studio and performance space, and they found an empty storefront on East 13th Street for the purpose.
Not only will the sound-design studio give Green the opportunity to develop his composition skills, it will allow him to apply his sound technology to film. “I don’t know if you know it,” he says, “but film sound is generally very primitive and terrible quality. But we can do multichannel digital sync sound first-generation. It would be like having stereo CD sound with film. Of course, you would have to project your film here, but the sound would be better than 70-millimeter Dolby.”
Last to join the project was Chris Murray: he directs (with Tony Fitzpatrick and Chet Witek) the Edge, a nonprofit art gallery that has been located in Villa Park for the last five years. The Edge will move into the Lookingglass, enabling Murray to bring his gallery into the heart of Chicago.
“And that’s the intangible element here,” concludes Green. “I could say that one of the advantages of working here is working with me. But if someone isn’t sympathetic to that, it doesn’t mean spit.”
