Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell have been partners for as long as anyone can remember—they met at Cranbrook, formed a romantic bond and design collaboration, got married and became a viable forty-year-old studio. Skolos attended Yale grad school, but their work does not, however, express many Yale-isms, unless you include Tom’s photography of objects with shapes that echo the Bauhaus aesthetic. Tom is a photographer, Nancy a graphic designer with a penchant for creating content around objects. Tom lights them with nuance and brilliance, Nancy turns those photos into stunning typographic collages, montages and tromps l’oiel.
Their new monograph, Overlap/Dissolve, comes out when so many others are on shelves or on their way—but it’s not like any other book. The overlaps and dissolves of Overlap/Dissolve (ORO Editions) are everywhere. Most of the book is made up of posters, which are treasures of Postmodern madness.
I asked them to tell me how they feel about seeing their work in this single volume. (Nancy answered most of the questions below.)
Overlap/Dissolve is a very apt title for your retrospective book. What does the title mean to you (and how many ways do you interpret that vis a vis your decidedly layered approach)?
Overlap/Dissolve describes our interest in merging type and image, two- and three-dimensional space, form and meaning. Overlap and dissolve are also associated with the signature layering and blurring in Postmodern design but too often people get overwhelmed by the visual aspects, thinking it looks like everything was thrown into a blender, without looking deeper for the symbolic associations that these layered compositional tactics facilitate. The book is a vehicle to share our thoughts and processes around creating complex work that mixes communication channels such as images—generally more open for interpretation—and type, which is a learned code. We set up compositional frameworks to express harmony, conflict, resolution, or both. For us there is never one perfect design solution, but the process generates one idea that overlaps and dissolves into the next.
In your preface you state: “Our work encompasses a blurring of personal love and professional trust.” You also include “collective discoveries.” There are a few items to unpack. I think I can embrace personal love, but how did you get clients to accept your approach and trust you with their ideas, wares and brands?
We were fortunate that we started our studio in Boston in the early ’80s, where technology was flourishing. Clients were looking for ways to communicate the innovation and uniqueness of their ideas and products. In the book we talk about hearing the word “software” for the first time and having no idea what it was. Almost everything we encountered was abstract and open to visual interpretation. The clients also appreciated how invested we were in the work; how responsible we were with deadlines, and how easy-going we were.
Can you explain the “collective discoveries” part of your practice?
We’ve both always loved the creative process—the back and forth while making—putting something on paper, letting it react and then responding back to it. Early on, we recognized exciting visual ideas in piles of colored scrap paper and little strips of type at the edges of the drawing board. We went out of our way to set up situations where these accidents could happen so we could sort them out and discover new potential—cutting up piles of magazines, making collages, and saving them in notebooks for future reference. Mixing the cut pieces of type and fragments of images shot with multiple perspectives set up unexpected type and image relationships. Even just a few pieces—one in front of the other, eclipsing the other—suddenly communicated action and meaning between them.
From the moment that I first saw your work around three decades ago I thought “Postmodern complexity.” How do you reconcile Modernism and Postmodernism?
Contemporary art and design education is finally moving away from Modernist-focused thinking, opening to broader influences. Even when we were starting out, Modern graphic design was getting stale, but we were exposed to a lot of ideas in Modern painting that had fired off in rapid succession—cubism, futurism, constructivism, surrealism, etc.—that left a lot of room in our minds for further exploration within the realm of graphic design at that time. For us, Postmodernism is just an extension of Modernism, digging deeper into the potential of form and meaning through shape, color, simultaneity, context and abstraction. We also find the more linguistic aspects of Postmodernism interesting because of the way encoding and decoding becomes a layered communication tool.
I never thought of your work as ideological but rather explorative. Tell me how you derived and refined your symbolic language.
We were both part of a team led by Tom Ockerse, who taught the RISD Graphic Design course “Making Meaning” in the early ’90s that was focused on semiotics. Exploring the dynamic relationships among various types of visual communication strongly influenced our work, moving it away from being almost completely abstract to including more discernible symbols and images.
Photography plays a huge role in your design. I can see the typophoto legacy retooled and reinvented. At what point—and why—did this become a signature of your practice?
When we first met at Cranbrook, Tom was a graduate student in photography, and I was an undergraduate student in design. It wasn’t until I went to graduate school at Yale that we started collaborating on posters for the Yale Symphony. We talk about this in one of the conversations in the book, “No Obstacles, Only Possibilities,” where I describe how excited I was about the potential of designing with photography. We were working on a poster for Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite and I went to the hobby store and bought a bunch of feathers, but had no idea what to do with them. Tom came up with the plan to place one in a 4×5 negative carrier and project it in an enlarger onto high-contrast photo paper. We cropped a vertical segment out of the feather image and its form echoed both a feather and a flame—perfect for the firebird. Over the years, photography became a natural part of our design process. Each image is constructed, not found, nor a product of a “decisive moment” approach. Instead, we work to assemble a symbolic image whose elements combine to reference the subject matter.
You’ve been one brain in two bodies for an amazingly long time. How’d you manage to achieve the meeting and matching and melding of the minds for this period?
Our relationship started out as a romantic one and we began working together because we both liked to work a lot, and we both also liked to be together most of the time. It was just luck that our ways of thinking complemented each other. We didn’t really do anything to make it happen. The longer we worked together, the more seamless it all became as we developed methods and sensibilities together in real time.
Do you ever spat over concepts or forms?
We had an agreement in the beginning that if a conflict came about, I had veto power over anything type-related and Tom had veto power over anything image-related, but we never had to use it. There were some tugs of wars along the way where we both had strong ideas and went off in different directions for a while, but we always managed to get things back into alignment. Our pieces are not necessarily even-handed, 50/50 collaborations, and it’s not like one person always does the same parts of the process. There are some pieces in the book that are 90/10 and 10/90. We both know to run with the best ideas, no matter which of us happens to think them up.
Your monograph ends with a personal discussion, “Finding Magic.” Is it magic or luck or both or none? What is magical?
Magical are those rare moments where you feel like you’ve really discovered something—transcending the familiar and creating a sensation or experience that provokes a new response. Photography is responsible for a lot of these moments because light is so magical. Photography still sets up an expectation in the viewer for reality, and we love breaking that and making something mysterious and extraordinary happen.
What’s on your professional future horizon?
We plan to continue designing and teaching (at least a course or two) forever, and we are also both pursuing additional creative endeavors. For example, Tom has been doing art photography, dramatically lighting Fall leaves in the studio, and making large-format digital prints. I’m a clarinetist and enjoy playing orchestra and chamber music and have recently been composing music—a great way to pull my music and creative sides together.
