Please join us at 6:30pm on Thursday, March 10 for a preview and artist talk with Chicago-based artist and writer Zachary Cahill and THE MISSION’s Anna Elise Johnson about her exhibition of recent acrylic block collages, Structural Adjustment.

Johnson collects official photographs taken during meetings between the leaders of the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the U.S. State Department and various heads of state undergoing structural adjustment. These multinational partners provide loans contingent on economic policies — as part of structural adjustment programming — and are most often impossible for the borrowing country to repay, benefiting the leaders of transnational corporations and the global, capitalist empire led by the United States. Johnson’s acrylic sculptures structurally readjust the photographs that represent, support and solidify these imperial operations.

ANNA ELISE JOHNSON (b. 1983) was born in Starnberg, Germany and currently resides in Los Angeles, California. Johnson received her BFA from Washington University (St. Louis, MO) and her MFA from the University of Chicago (Chicago, IL). Johnson was a Core Program Fellow at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston from 2012 to 2014. She has recently exhibited solo exhibitions at GAR Gallery (Galveston, TX), Blaffer Art Museum (Houston, TX) and Lage Egal (Berlin, Germany). Her work has been included in numerous group exhibitions including Moments in the System at THE MISSION (Houston, TX), The Ambassadors at Cris Worley Fine Arts (Dallas, TX), Linear Imaginations at Sicardi Gallery (Houston, TX), Mass Media, Mixed Media at Cuchifritos Gallery & Project Space (New York) and Wildernesses at The Logan Center (Chicago, IL). Structural Adjustment is Johnson’s first solo exhibition at THE MISSION.

ZACHARY CAHILL is an interdisciplinary artist who has been working on the long term the project USSA 2012, an exhibition-based fictional narrative relating to concepts of nation building, since 2009. He has had solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, Germany; the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; the Smart Museum of Art; and Threewalls, Chicago, amongst other. His work has recently been included in The Works: Artists in and From Chicagoat CAB Brussels, Belgium (2015), Magic Mountain at the MCA Santa Barbara (2015), the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014) and numerous exhibitions in the US and Europe. His writings have appeared in Afterall, Artforum, Frieze, and Mousse. Cahill is a regular contributor to Artforum.com and a co-editor of the contemporary art journal Afterall.

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Tags: Anna Elise Johnson, Noble Square, The Mission, West Town, Zachary Cahill