Nolis Anderson is a Chicago-based visual artist and photographer. Anderson has over a decade of experience working in editorial, advertising, and commercial photography across the globe, with clients ranging from New Balance to Rolling Stone Magazine. Anderson received a Doctorate of Pharmacy degree in 2012 and worked in medicine for two years before shifting his focus toward photography. No Such Thing is the inaugural exhibition of Anderson’s fine arts practice.

About the exhibition:
Elise Seigenthaler Gallery is pleased to present No Such Thing, an exhibition of eight medium-format photographs by Chicago-based artist Nolis Anderson. Anderson’s first show with the gallery, No Such Thing brings together a series of works that consider the idea of perfection through the lens of portraiture and material process.

Shot over the course of three years, this series of work represents Anderson’s desire to shift away from the clean, intentional, and manicured visual language that had come to define his photography. Each image grew from a conversation with the subject about the role of perfection in their creative practice, which expanded into questions of self-image, lived experience, and personal understanding of what constitutes perfection, how it shapes our relationship to the act of existing. Excerpts from the conversations accompany the photographs in a zine, bringing the multiplicity of Anderson’s subjects’ perspectives into relation with his images.

The material qualities of each photograph are central to the exhibition. Rather than meticulously controlling every element of the photographic and development process, Anderson has allowed the unpredictability and imperfections inherent to working with film fold in to the rich beauty of his imagery. Erratic scratch marks, dust, and squiggles dance across the surface of certain photographs while in others ghostly, shimmering rays of white light envelop the subjects. Faint, spectral shapes irregularly dot the images, imbuing them with a textural depth that complicates any expectation that a photograph should feel impeccably neat and fully resolved. Rather than treating these effects as flaws, Anderson embraces each unexpected mark or blemish and incorporates it into the finished image, reflecting his interest in the space between intention and accident.