Trading Spaces (Darkroom/White Cube)

Matthew Lax, Collaborative Memory Drawing 1 (Peter) (still), 2026/in-progress. Courtesy the artist.

This week, Film Notes is pleased to publish artist and filmmaker Matthew Lax’s essay on his ongoing film project about The Zone, a Los Angeles gay sex club formerly housed in the building now occupied by Lisson Gallery. Reading this conversion as the replacement of one architecture of desire by another, Lax asks how film might reconstruct a queer space from the images and memories left behind.

In painting and color theory, black absorbs all color. In physics, black is the absence of light itself. On the other end of the spectrum, white is the absence of color, or the accumulation of all light. In film, a fade or cut to black often signifies a pause or a conclusion. A fade to white implies transcendence, a celestial epilogue.  

In 2023, blue chip gallery Lisson, which already boasted locations in New York, London, Shanghai, and Beijing, opened its LA outpost in a two-story warehouse at 1037 N Sycamore Avenue. This building was previously occupied by the notorious Hollywood gay sex club The Zone, which operated there from July 1991 until its closure in 2020.

As a filmmaker who was a patron of The Zone and has been consistently employed in the art world for almost 15 years, this story haunts me. A sex club’s transformation into a commercial art gallery is a palimpsest of aesthetic and economic conditions. Gentrification and urbanization, collective memory and cultural amnesia, consumption and visibility—each are revealed by the architectures of desire inherent to the darkroom and the white cube. My own films center on a participatory and durational model—not as an indicator of temporality or shot length, but of the time involved in building relationships both on and off screen. I sensed immediately the Zone was the subject for a film.

In 2020, prior to Lisson’s renovations, the building’s lot lay dormant. I visited the site repetitively. I filmed the exterior of the building. I sent letters to addresses and PO boxes I found through the LA Public Records Office, trying to get in touch with the owner. My letters were either “returned to sender” or unacknowledged. I contemplated sending a drone through the broken second-story window. I abandoned the footage to focus on other projects. 

In March 2022, my friend Scott shared a WeHo Times Instagram post announcing Lisson’s opening in the old Zone building.1 A “@peterdeep” had commented, claiming he was the original Zone owner. Deep said the building had been taken from him by his former business partner who then “ran the club into the ground.” I DM’d Peter, asking if we could film an interview. Deep’s travel plans and my own technical needs proved difficult to coordinate for a remote interview. Three years later, in May 2025 and en route to a wedding in Mexico City, I made a pit stop in Playa del Carmen to meet Peter with my camera.

Once we began filming, I gave Peter a sketchpad and pencil. I asked him if he could draw the club for me from memory. At first Peter refused, saying he couldn’t possibly remember. Sighing, he procured his own three-sided ruler from inside the apartment. 

As he drew, Peter told stories about collaborating with the Health Department to open a sex club during the AIDS crisis (no easy feat), the stationary Volkswagen that was parked inside the club’s gated patio for customers to hang out and fuck in, and bartending in Boston in the 80s before going sober. His ruler glided across the sketchpad. He sketched doors and vestibules, gloryholes and emergency exits. I asked him where he learned to draw, and Peter explained that he briefly went to architecture school but dropped out to pursue a career in nightlife.

The Zone has no functional archive. For obvious security reasons, photography was strictly forbidden. When Peter first moved to Mexico around 2007, he sold and got rid of all his possessions. In addition to constant renovations, the building burned down once (purportedly by a tweaking queen after being denied entry) and changed ownership at least twice amid several civil suits. Save for a few pixelated images on the defunct Yelp page, no image of the club’s interior seems to have survived.

Alongside this visual absence, there is also no textual description of the club. Advertisements for The Zone in Planet Homo, an alternative West Coast queer magazine which Deep acquired in the 90s and then managed as Editor and later Editor-in-Chief, feature minimal graphics. Sparse text simply indicates “a men's-only membership club.” Neither the 1997 LA Times article2 which followed The Zone’s multiple zoning disputes with the city, nor the 1991 LA Weekly3 report documenting the LAPD raids on the club, describe the club’s interior. 

According to my research, there were at least 10 pornographic films shot on location at The Zone: eight titles directed by celebrated pornographer Chi Chi LaRue of Channel 1 Releasing; the World of Wonder documentary Inside Deep Throat (2005) about the original Deep Throat (1972); and a particularly smutty watersports flick, Pigs at The Zone (2006), from the now-defunct Dick Wadd Studios, which I came upon years before I even knew about The Zone. Together, these films provide some of the only surviving documentation of the club. 

With Chi Chi’s help, I located several of the Channel 1 titles. Meticulously, I scrubbed through MP4 files of early HD video, trying to locate a wide shot of the club. Cinderblock and wooden enclosures painted black, chain-link fences, AC ducts, and exit signs inconspicuously flash through tight compositions of flesh. I take screenshots. A 24-pack of plastic-wrapped bottled water sits on a bench. Fake camouflage foliage hangs from the ceiling. Beneath a sling gyrating under the weight of a group scene, a single hard pretzel lies discarded on the tile floor. 

In a spreadsheet organized by each porn’s timecode, I match the screengrabs with sections of Peter’s drawings. Storyboarding, the method used to block a script through sequenced illustrations depicting camera angles, is a blueprint for a film. In a film about a building with no blueprint, Peter’s drawing is a map, revealing not only what the club looked like but how one moved through the entire space.

In construction, an “as-built” is a blueprint made after the building is complete, or when there is no blueprint available. The as-built is a record of the original form. The porns feature no establishing shots. Every shot includes a body. Time is money, so while most films from this era have a loose plot, screentime was not wasted on documenting its milieu. 

I try to cut these films together, a structuralist nod to Christian Marclay’s Doors (2022), wherein hundreds of unrelated films are bridged together through the match cut of the opening and closing of different doors. If the camerawork was slightly different, I could use these unavoidable porn bodies as avatars to travel through The Zone across the different films.

Since my encounter with Peter, I’ve filmed other people drawing The Zone. I call these as-builts “collaborative memory drawings.” I am not interested in the structural integrity of the amateur blueprints; more so how space is embodied through the memory of each occupant, many years removed from the event. From these testimonies, I slowly produce 3D digital models which attempt to rebuild the entire club through the fragmented imagination of its own community—landscapes which oscillate between third- and first-person perspectives.

The white cube is still a relatively recent phenomenon within art history. In the Western tradition, art galleries, beginning with the palaces of the 15th century aristocracy and the church, installed different artworks all together and on top of one another. “Salon-style,” as we now pejoratively call it, was about volume and accumulation. As painting and other forms developed, framing trends adapted and installation methods changed, giving individual works breadth. In spartan gallery presentations through the 50s and 60s, the pristine white cube emerged as Modernism’s orderly reaction to the legacy of Enlightenment’s clutter.

As Brian O’Doherty writes in Inside the White Cube, Modernism proposes a “neutral” context for art in stark relief to real life.4 It is now more or less understood that this idea of neutrality, a leftover of a white, hegemonic philosophy, is impossible. While installation, conceptual art, the Light and Space movement, expanded cinema, new media, and performance art all probe the limits of the gallery, the cube, once a radical form itself, has now prevailed as the conventional viewing format, particularly for painting and sculpture.

In the case of The Zone and Lisson, the replacement of one temple of desire for another reveals similar objectives through seemingly opposing aesthetics and methodologies. Different spaces—one for sex, the other display and commerce—are ultimately both about property, value, and libidinal desire through durational experiences based in transaction and a multisensory experience. The common activity shared by these two spaces is looking, or entertainment, as O’Doherty calls it in his 2007 follow-up treatise, Studio as Cube.5 The eyes move through a vast expanse of interior space guided by their own interiority, waiting for something or someone to catch them—both a physical and existential look. Hidden in plain sight, the darkroom and the white cube sharpen the gaze itself.

Darkrooms, the historical precursor and smaller version of a club like The Zone, are an architectural attraction dating back to the earliest queer gathering spaces, providing intentional and concealed places for sex. Whether a designated area at the back of a bar, a larger bathhouse, or a sex club like The Zone, the darkroom is a low-light space, a kind of shadow-puppet pre-cinema which borrows its name from photography. The darkroom operates semi-covertly in public and, not unlike the art world, is advertised by word-of-mouth and insider publications.

The white cube employs complete exposure by way of architectural subtraction. Artificial daylight, a bounce board on which to conduct trade, signals the value of the objet d'art by way of isolation. Unlike the darkroom, the gallery is documented every four to six weeks according to an exhibition calendar. Places like The Zone exist only in the minds of those who experience it as a kind of first-person text. Like art history, the darkroom is the stuff of gossip.

The darkroom is also one of the few democratic spaces where class does not prohibit social mobility, but like the gallery and other places of business, monetary and social transactions are also inextricable from sex. The darkroom is not a utopia: these places often carry the burden of colonial histories and prejudice in perhaps more obvious ways than real life. Whereas the gallery enshrines exclusivity, the darkroom suggests an alternative model.

In my interviews, former patrons describe The Zone as a “pleasure palace.” Inside a gutted cinderblock warehouse, the two-story plywood and chain-link structure housed a maze, gloryhole booths, a bi-level “cockpit,” slings, a mezzanine catwalk, and other anatomical attractions built for sex and voyeurism. While not so different from other clubs in its basic offerings, The Zone was unusual in scale. Patrons recall constant renovations and improvements. One weekend parts of the club would be closed, then re-opened weeks later and completely different. This Borgesian construction resulted in several such “zones” within one Zone, leading to the sensation of moving through different worlds, best described by one Reddit user as “anonymous sex at a laser tag course.”6 

My favorite of these worlds was the screening room. Tucked away on the mezzanine level, tiered wooden seating, bleacher-style and five rows high, faced outward so the floor and opposite wall became a kind of stage. Above, three mounted screens played different porns. I stumbled through the maze and wound up in Ancient Greece. This simple blackbox was the historic agora, an open-air commons which functioned as market, public forum, and theater. Among the seated bodies wrapped around one another, I imagined great orators would appear, a là Bette Midler at Continental Baths in 1970s New York City, their ensuing impassioned speeches on democracy, the city-state, and collective pleasure giving way to orgiastic climax amongst the attendees. This fantasy never materialized, but the stagecraft reminds me that the gallery is still a potential gathering space for fugitives, outsiders, and radical ideas.

On July 19, 1991—opening night—the LAPD raided The Zone, because Deep “had the audacity to open a gay club in LA.”7 Incidents and complaints from the city and residents would continue for the next decade.8 The club’s 30-year tenure was bookended by two major health catastrophes: the AIDS epidemic and the COVID-19 pandemic. Deep originally conceived the club as a gathering place for sober men to meet and have safe sex. Indeed, the Zone was one of the first such businesses to operate within LA city limits and provided a unique service during the AIDS crisis. But unlike the tiddy bars, casinos, and porn theaters on Sunset Boulevard, and in the incorporated city of West Hollywood mere blocks away, Hollywood businesses faced more municipal scrutiny. Deep chose the Sycamore building in part because the area was already zoned for “mixed-use,” meaning industrial, office, and retail spaces existed side-by-side with apartment buildings. The sex club’s next-door neighbor was a textbook supplier’s warehouse. 

Lisson was not the first gallery to open in the Sycamore District. Stalwart LA dealership Regen Projects moved to Santa Monica Boulevard, four blocks away from The Zone, in 2012 and has been there since, followed in 2015 by non-profit art space LAXART (later renamed The Brick) which remained there until 2022. There were others. LAXART’s building, now an extension of Jeffrey Deitch’s LA imprint, was previously the historic Radio Recorders music studio. In January of this year, Spotify opened Sycamore Studios, a venue for podcasters, down the 900 block.

Like any prudent business, galleries follow the low rents. Early adapters residually accrue street cred for operating in “grimier” neighborhoods they inadvertently (or not) “develop,” eventually making it attractive for other galleries, espresso bars, five-star restaurants, and Tesla dealerships. Longtime tenants and residents get priced out, erased by increasingly corporate uniformity. The Sycamore District was already a vibrant urban ecosystem based on artistic production as much as commerce, with The Zone figuring as its underground nexus. 

In 2019, after attending a staging of writer Hilton Als’ Lives of the Performers at LAXART, I walked around the corner to The Zone. Darting between sidewalk encampments and discarded needles, I achieved intellectual and carnal fulfilment in immediate succession, without getting back on the freeway. This kind of gallery crawl was once rare in a car city like LA.

The closure of The Zone was inevitable and had almost nothing to do with Lisson. In March 2020, presumably already facing dwindling membership because of hookup and dating apps, COVID-19 forced Deep’s successor to finally close. Lockdowns prevented physically gathering, making it impossible for the club to conduct business. The neighborhood was already getting “cleaned up.” Places like The Zone still exist, but they are increasingly rare, especially in the United States. From my perspective as a gallery worker, as someone who sells art and believes in the capacity of art, and as a longtime Zone member, the replacement of my community with the esoteric form of retail I also participate in is a bitter reminder that we are living the final act of late-stage capitalism.

Since Lisson assumed stewardship of the building, the white stucco facade has remained almost the same. Three square windows still dot the second floor. The original patio was eliminated, and a new glass front door waits on the opposite bank of the same small parking lot which protects the building from the sidewalk. Inside, the box office is now a viewing room. The old labyrinth is now a vast, clean atrium boasting four skylights. Instead of lube and condoms, the gallery assistant gives me a price list. Confronted by the indifference of the vacuous cube, the countless nights I spent sucking dick in this very spot feel almost unreal. 

“Men are not going to stop having sex,” Peter Deep said in 1994,9 regarding the municipal ordinances. Deep obviously wasn’t wrong, but he could not have predicted the cultural shift. The internet did not end cruising, either—it simply changed how people meet for sex.

The Zone recalls another Zone: the dystopian, shape-shifting landscape which shares the same name from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 sci-fi film Stalker. Like both darkroom and gallery, Stalker’s Zone also promises to adapt to the fantasies of its occupants, fulfilling their ultimate wishes. But the anti-hero, Stalker, finds significance not in the achievement of his quest inside the Zone, but in the pilgrimage itself, prioritizing reality over escape. 

Stalker’s own production was stalled when the filmstock was developed improperly. Tarkovsky reshot the entire film. Effectively, Stalker is a remake of itself, which took almost four years to complete. I think of The Zone as Peter Deep’s life work. I am still working on my film. I am obsessed with the saga, accumulating my own archive of Zone ephemera and this formative period in Los Angeles. 

I daydream that the film is complete. I take all the collaborative memory drawings penned by different people and combine them, layering them onto one another. Another building emerges. This reimagining of The Zone is not a nostalgic eulogy, but an attempt to learn from this history of replacement through its own chosen family. To envision something more sustainable is to remember what happened here. My film, stalled by funding issues and its own technical difficulties, is also about the journey, simultaneously peering through the darkness and squinting in the glaring light, grasping at something lost forever.