By Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell
288 pages, hardcover, $50
Published by Oro Editions
oroeditions.com

They’ve built Plexiglas models, heated type into spirals and stuffed balloons with plaster to make rock formations. Designers Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell transformed their three-dimensional constructions into two-dimensional posters through collaboration and innovative photography. Their compatible interests—Skolos in design and text and Wedell in photography—produced 40 years of work as partners at design practice Skolos-Wedell that has transitioned from predigital to high technology.

Primarily known for designs composed with geometric shapes, layered textures and intersecting planes, Skolos-Wedell groups its work in the book Overlap/Dissolve by decades from the 1980s to the 2020s. After meeting at Cranbrook Academy of Art, Skolos and Wedell married and opened a design firm in Boston that provided marketing materials for the booming tech industry. Testing materials and creating dimensional pieces by hand was so challenging that Skolos says they “worked more than a hundred hours per week for the first twenty years…”

The book’s design complements Skolos-Wedell’s posters with a sense of unlimited variation and shifting energy. Viewers can ramp up their engagement with a complex design then visually rest in the white of a calming page. The central text of Overlap/Dissolve is an informal Q&A between Skolos and Wedell that becomes an illuminating discussion of their process and aesthetic choices. They’re interested in creating work that generates questions and challenges structural conventions. When viewers see something in an unconventional way, “that’s visual magic, and it’s emotional,” Wedell says, adding that magic is “a critical component of every piece we create.” —Ruth Hagopian ca