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The Meeting is the collaborative work of Mallory Kate and Lyndsey Langsdale: an evolving body of visual art, performance, archetype creation, and somatic inquiry exploring the overlapping space between identity, shadow, relationship, and embodiment.

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It is the space where two people overlap — the Vesica Piscis, the Venn diagram, the thin seam where connection happens, where color is born, where shadow lives.

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The project began in 2015 when the artists met, and formally began producing collaborative work in 2023 through a gallery exhibition introducing four foundational archetypes. Developed in response to the limitations of traditional Jungian frameworks, these archetypes were created not as fixed symbolic roles, but as dynamic psychological forces shaped by lived experience. Each archetype contains its own internal polarity: integration and distortion, light and shadow, regulation and collapse existing within the same figure.

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The Meeting is also named for Carl Jung’s statement:

 

“The meeting with oneself is, at first, the meeting with one's own shadow. The shadow is a tight passage, a narrow door, whose painful constriction no one is spared who goes down to the deep well. But one must learn to know oneself in order to know who one is.”

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While the artists found much of Jung’s archetypal language too male, binary, and reductive in its treatment of women, this particular passage became foundational. The narrow door. The deep well. The shadow as passage. The Meeting emerged from that recognition.

The project became two things simultaneously: the relational space between two collaborators, and the internal psychological space where shadow material waits to be confronted. Through painting, installation, clown, theatre, somatic experimentation, ritual, writing, and performance, the artists use collaboration as a form of mirroring — revealing patterns, defenses, ruptures, exiles, and attempts at repair.

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The initial gallery exhibition established the formal backbone of the project through archetypal installations, symbolic mapping systems, photographic work, canvas paintings, video accompaniments, and written texts. Since then, The Meeting has expanded into theatrical and clown-based works including Meeting Rainbow, a satirical children’s show for adults about fight-or-flight responses, nervous system regulation, shame, and the inner child. Additional works have explored subjects such as Evelyn Primm — the real woman whose body became the iconic Reno, Nevada Primadonna statue — performance anxiety, somatic activation, ritual burning altars, and the body’s survival responses under intimacy and exposure.

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Throughout the work, recurring themes emerge:

• the inner child as exile and witness

• rupture and repair

• the nervous system as storyteller

• archetypes rewritten through lived experience

• collaboration as co-regulation and confrontation

• humor as survival strategy

• shadow not as pathology, but as necessary passage

 

The Meeting resists commodification and fixed conclusions. Early installations included altars where viewers were invited to leave offerings to burn. Nothing was for sale. Money was never the point. The work prioritizes transformation, witnessing, and psychological excavation over object production alone.

 

The project is currently expanding toward a larger archetypal system of 8–12 unified archetypes developed through ongoing lived experience, somatic work, Internal Family Systems–informed exploration, and collaborative performance practice. New archetypes continue to emerge from the artists’ shared investigations into the inner child, rupture, authority, regulation, rebellion, attachment, and embodiment.

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At its core, The Meeting is two artists continuing to show up for one another and for themselves — passing through the narrow door again and again, building work from whatever waits on the other side.

 

 

 

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