Exhibition: Friday, October 8, 2010 - Friday, November 12, 2010
Performance: Friday, October 8, 2010 — 8:00pm
Referencing Frankenstein, Lambstein, is a performance of a human in a lamb suit lying motionless on a silver table. It provokes questions of cloning and mutatious transformations, questioning the boundaries of the monstrous and the ‘natural’. The body of the lamb on the examination table references both the film Frankenstein and the first cloned lamb, Dolly, while its stillness and horizontal pose occupies an ambiguous space between life and death. This gesture seeks to evoke questions surrounding the social status of genetically manipulated organisms and discussions surrounding the issue of their being ‘real’ or ‘natural’ or not and the subsequent treatment that is dependent on this determination.
Nicole Rayburn’s work deals primarily in the realms of video and performance based media. The cultural milieu of science-fiction, scientific research, cinematic and literary sources continually infiltrate and inform her practice. Rayburn’s research interests focus primarily on theories of the post-human and the possibilities of reconceptualizing human and non-human relations. She is a graduate of the University of Western Ontario Masters of Fine Arts program and currently resides in Toronto, Ontario.