The small space feels enormous, the scuffed up floors and muted lights adding an appropriate air of sterility. An enormous curtain hangs in one corner, the heavy weight of its latex material grasped by wires, attached to a metal ring hung from the ceiling. The curtain strains against its vastness of crinkly creases and folds, imprinted with countless syringes. It's illuminated from within, casting out a glow like burnt sugar.

In the opposite corner of the gallery, two gurneys (like those carted around clinics) sit splayed with what first appear as assorted medical ephemera (gauze, tensor bandages). A closer look reveals a collection of garments - lingerie, bras, underwear. Among the collection are bras made from tensor bandages, held together with clips, like a mummy's wrappings. Other garments made of latex look like cured skin, some imprinted with syringes. A belt made of condoms hangs from a drawer. Underwear is made of fragile tensor bandages, adorned with crinoline. The clothes appear lost in time, like deathly underwear from some post-apocalyptic future, or stolen from a hidden tomb.

Adina Edwards' Behind the Red Curtain is unsettling and erotic, loaded with commentary, a medical fetishist's dream or another's nightmare. The poster for the show has Edwards, sporting boxing gloves, meditating in the corner of a ring. She's either worn and weary, or ready to fight. (And despite the mournful and meditative nature of the exhibition, I'd suspect the latter.) The name opens itself to multiple interpretations: "The negative, secretive; violence behind closed doors," says Edwards. "It's from the '80s, the Cold War - asking what's behind closed doors. There's blood and infection in there too."

The creepy, gauzy underwear make one feel as a voyeur to someone's private pain, the usual arousal caused by them usurped by their haunting, medical nature. While the appearance of such signifiers like condoms and needles would suggest social outrage, one fails to find an easy way of according pat ethical judgments upon the work. "I've made work in the past that smacks people in the face," says Edwards. "I've moved away from that. I appreciate the activist approach, but this is more ambiguous, riskier. The show has some degree of hopelessness."

The curtain hides the deterioration of those deemed socially unworthy, while brushing against fetish, arousal and death. Garments used to both arouse the wearer and their objects of desire aren't supple or made for comfort, but constructed of materials cribbed from a hospital supply closet. "It's a really vulnerable exhibit for me," says Edwards. "[I'm] looking at sex and its relation to power, and the loss of intimacy. The power of seduction as this easy way you may think you're gaining power and control. As women, we're inherently objects - to deny that is a joke. Usually, [lingerie] are garments of seduction, but these aren't Hanes undergarments."

Behind is partly informed by her own experiences with social work, which she's done for the past 10 years, harm reduction theory, and "negotiating health care services and the problematic ideas around confinement and gendered spaces." Edwards is also candid about her past: "During conversation, it does come up," she says. "I'll talk about it - it's in my artist's statement. I was using; I worked in a strip bar, sold myself. I had these jobs... I got treated like a fucking asshole. School was a break, and art was a necessity."

Behind the Red Curtain ran from November 3 - 7, 2008.

University of Calgary Faculty of Fine Arts