Congratulations to second-year MFA candidate Allison Bolah! She was awarded a 2014 Minnesota State Arts Board Artist Initiative Grant to expand her on-going project, Tell Me About Your Mother, a multimedia project that explores how subtle expressions shape narrative meaning.

Allison writes: “Mythology surrounding the phrase ‘tell me about your mother’ holds that it was central to Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalytic theory and practice. Indeed, the trope of Freudian analysis is so embedded in American pop culture consciousness that thrown around in casual conversation and played for laughs in movies is the notion that the root of our ability to adjust to the world around us is ultimately tied to our relationships with our mothers.

While Tell Me About Your Mother owes a great deal to a surface reading of the phrase, its source, and its current place in American culture, the project was born not from discussions about immediate anxieties or neuroses, but rather conversations about home and heritage, our private origin stories.”

The resulting exhibition will take place in diverse, community-based venues in Minnesota.

To see more Allison’s work, please visit Allison Bolah