NEW FOLKLORE
Having made space to consider some of the challenges we collectively face, this third conversation in the Wild Mythologies series explores the role of imaginative storytelling in shaping how we think about community. Featuring artists Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler and Stephanie Deumer, and directed by 2025 Curatorial Fellow Jessica Holtaway, the program includes a screening of Deumer’s Spooky Action at a Distance and an excerpt from Meitzler’s The Bird, The Girl and The Typhoon.
Together, the artists reflect on how folklore—the beliefs, customs, and stories of a community—can be used to imagine new possibilities, challenge dominant structures, and offer alternative narratives of value and connection.
Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a San Francisco-based artist who explores fiction and myth as tools to deconstruct how power, race, and colonialism are entangled in both political and personal narratives of worth and value. Her recent work The Bird, The Girl and The Typhoon tells the story of a red bird that signals the end of typhoon season and the arrival of the harvest. Previous works explore themes of connectivity and precarity through mythological figures such as the crocodile—a guardian of the underworld and reincarnation of the dead.
Stephanie Deumer is a Los Angeles-based artist whose work centers on the formation of social constructions through language, media, and technology, and how these constructions intersect with gendered experience. Her project A Diamond is Forever (supported by Prospect Art’s New Work Focus on Los Angeles Grant in 2023) featured a lab-grown diamond made from the artist’s own hair, unpacking the complex social and economic systems that render objects valuable. In Spooky Action at a Distance, Deumer examines how mythology, labor, and digital entertainment have historically fragmented and erased women’s bodies.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS
Angeline Marie Michael Meitzler is a writer and experimental 3D animator based in Berkeley, California. Her work engages fiction, history, and natural phenomena to examine cultural value and the lingering effects of colonial legacies. Drawing inspiration from Philippine etiological myths, she often frames the environment as an active force—both liberatory and destructive. Her films and writing have been recognized by Digging Press, Newfound, and exhibited at venues including the Singapore Biennial, CAAMFest, and CURRENTS. She holds an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Georgia Tech, and is a recipient of the Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship and an Asian Cultural Council Individual Fellowship.
Stephanie Deumer is a Canadian visual artist living and working in Los Angeles, California. Her multi-media installations often incorporate sculpture, video, and audio, and explore relationships between technology, science, gender, and culture. Deumer completed a BA at the University of Guelph in Canada and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts. She was a fellow at the Whitney Independent Study Program in New York and has been awarded grants from the California Arts Council, Canada Council for the Arts, Foundation for Contemporary Arts, Prospect Art, and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation, among others. She is currently a lecturer at the University of Washington, Seattle, and California State University, San Marcos.