Pascal Bernier — Hunting Accident, 1997

Pascal Bernier’s Hunting Accidents series began with the chance discovery of a taxidermied fawn at a flea market. Confronted with the animal, the artist was reminded of the childhood shock of seeing Bambi’s mother killed in Disney’s 1942 eponymous animation. He took the fawn home and instinctively wrap- ped it in bandages, as though tending to its wounds. Hunting Accident continues this gesture with a taxidermied badger. Bernier does not kill animals for his practice. With the exception of the first fawn, the animals were prepared by professional taxidermists before entering his studio. The bandages expose a paradox central to the work: a dead animal, transformed into the object of care, can provoke stronger feelings of empathy than the living animal whose death made the trophy possible.

Pascal Bernier examines the construction and manipulation of emotions in the context of ecological upheavals and the endangerment of living beings. Through installations featuring taxidermied animals adorned with bandages and wounds, his work navigates the tensions between care and injury, violence and tenderness, revealing the complex and often ambivalent relationships humans maintain with other living beings.