Innerspace, the DIY performance room that artist Carl Janes walled off inside his studio at Underground Atlanta, is finished. Janes did not renew his lease when it ran out at the end of 2024, and he has now moved out. The space that hosted several shows a week is empty.
Janes arrived at Underground in September 2021, when the property first began leasing studios to resident artists, a shift downtownATL covered in its look at the district's grassroots arts scene. His plan was to make his own visual work there. The music started almost at once. At his first art show in the studio, he met a musician, connected her with a couple of other musicians he knew, and a show was booked right away. The first official performance followed in February 2022.
Nothing about the build was polished. Janes put together a stage from pallets salvaged off the loading dock and drove around the state hunting for PA equipment. He is a performer himself, leading a synth-heavy act called Invaders On Mars, and he had done this before. His earlier project, The Secret Spot, turned an abandoned building beside the Midway Pub in East Atlanta Village into an art studio with a rooftop stage. That building is gone, replaced by a townhouse complex.
How the room ran
Across roughly two and a half years, Janes made his own art by day and ran the room on nights and weekends. He hosted at least three shows and sometimes up to six shows every week, with three or four acts on a typical bill. He tried to keep costs low for the musicians, and door money went to the performers. Many of the acts were young, and plenty of emerging artists played their first shows there, though Janes said the crowds cut across generations.
Janes described his approach as community first and business second: he started with the artists and the people, then built a structure around what they needed. He pointed out that small rooms like his are hard to make profitable, in part because so much depends on whether an act can draw a crowd, and that newer acts struggle to get a start in traditional venues. In his view, spaces that serve as "incubators to projects and experimentation" matter to the wider music scene.
Parents came to thank him over the years. Some told him that the venue and the people around it had, figuratively, saved the lives of children who had been searching for a sense of direction.
The decision to leave
Janes said two things set the stage for the closure: the struggle to keep costs low, and changes to the lease requirements set by Underground Atlanta. He called the moment "very bittersweet" and said that once he accepted it was time to go, he felt a strong sense of relief. He had always regarded his stay at Underground as temporary.
The final night of performances put Janes, usually off to the side minding the sound and lights, in the middle of the room. At the insistence of some of the musicians, he was seated on a chair and lifted overhead. He said he has felt a wave of support since the news, and that because past losses have led him to something better, he remains hopeful about what comes next.
Original reporting by Isadora Pennington for Rough Draft Atlanta.