BY KAREN BOSSICK

Taxidermists mount animal trophies through a combination of skinning and tanning.

Pamela DeTuncq does hers with needlepoint and French tapestries.

The result: A colorful deer sporting the picture of a Frenchman and the words “aristide Bruant dans socabaret” that looks as if it’s strutting down a runway.

Or, another deer emerging from a wall boasting a Kokopelli-like figure on its mane.

Or yet another deer boasting a collage of cabins flocked with snow, a man behind a horse-drawn sleigh and a howling wolf, evoking scenes of Sun Valley.

The exhibition, which she has titled “Fauna Mori,” has earned the artist who lives north of Hailey her first exhibition at Gail Severn Gallery, right alongside another Sun Valley artist—David deVillier, who has been exhibiting with the gallery since the mid-1990s.

The exhibition will be on display during tonight’s Christmas Gallery Walk—from 5 to 8 p.m. Friday, Dec. 29. And both artists will discuss their work during free Artist Chats at 10 a.m. Saturday, Dec. 30, at the gallery at 400 First Avenue North in Ketchum.

DeTuncq’s deer canvases follow Gail Severn’s exhibition featuring large-scale wall tapestries.

“I think Pamela’s works will be very appealing to our audiences with their play on the trophies that the hunting crowd covets in the West,” said Gallery Owner Gail Severn. “As a fiber major, I love her use of needlepoint and her attention to how taxidermy is done, and I love the whimsy and uniqueness. I love the use of color and intellectual component that goes along with it. And I think the audience will appreciate that no animals were killed in the making of these. Even the antlers were shed antlers.”

DeTuncq has always taken a different approach to art. She collected thousands of eggs from local breakfast cafes, then washed, sterilized, crushed and tinted them to create a carpet displaying the fragile perfection of a June Cleaver, complete with vacuum, for an installation at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts’ Hailey house.

She created full body casts of six teenagers, then laboriously needle felted raw wool into the jeans and hoodies of her plaster replicas to depict the rush to peer conformity through the then-relatively new medium of the cell phone for The Center. The project was later installed at the Boise Art Museum and other museums across the country.

Her tapestried taxidermy deer grew out of a body of work she developed to explore how people age that included a life-sized human form filled with multi-colored prescription pills and a walker pieced together with a prosthetic hip.

“Fauna Mori” provides an irreverent look at the fleeting nature of life through the ancient art of taxidermy.

“My intent is not merely to please the eye but, rather, to explore the question of what becomes of our identity when we are no longer among the living,” she said. “What becomes of the story of who we were and the life we lived when we are dead? Those who live on after us become the taxidermists of our remembered selves, leaving us to be doctored, decorated and either diminished or enhanced, depending on the storyteller.

“The stories we tell about the departed reshape and reconstruct the dead after their passing,” she added. “As the living, we do it to others and, as the departed, it will be done to us. This work invites us to ponder just how our post-mortem self might be presented and preserved.”

Alongside DeTuncq, David deVillier returns with a new exhibition, which includes whimsical sculptural interpretations of the human form depicting layered dreams, relationships, desires and seductions as  they address the psychological world rolling inside our human heads.

His exhibition, “Women Who Know” was influenced by ongoing discussions related to political, social and gender issues.

“David is always pushing the envelope and adding and building on past works,” said Severn. “His interest in the environment and women is constantly growing, addition to his consistent narratives in his sculptural figures and portraits.”

DID YOU KNOW?

Pamela DeTuncq has received a 2018 fellowship from the Idaho Commission on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. In connection with that fellowship her collection, “The Aging Project,” will be shown at five venues across the state.