Despite its elegiac subject, much of the exhibition is vivid and colorful. The book is bound in pink cloth: a three-quarter-height dust jacket features a detail of the collaboration I Used to Think I Knew Everyone (2017).

The bright coloration carries into the interior, though the overall presentation is quiet and restrained. The book is humanely scaled and sits comfortably in the hand; its binding is sewn and its back rounded for flexibility. It is printed on a coated dull stock, with the main text in gray ink with a dull base to reduce page shine.

Installation of Receding View (2017), a monumental quilt spread over a single bed and much of the gallery floor. Loss of Material Evidence is composed principally in Matthew Butterick’s Century Supra, an elegant—though still gimlet-eyed—revision of M. F. Benton’s 1919 workhorse, ATF Century Schoolbook.

The artists’ daughter, Rosa Inocencio-Smith, an editor at The Atlantic, contributed a tribute to her parents, which we placed in the middle of a joint portrait of her mother .  .  .

.   .   .  and her father, at the end of the book’s introductory section.

The pacing of Loss of Material Evidence is based on a visitor’s movement through the galleries. Installation images like this one, used two or three in sequence, create the book’s four divisions, panning the room before moving in on the work that starts the next section.

An essay by Linda Tesner, the curator of the Hoffman Gallery, runs the length of the book and is illustrated in context; the book has no traditional plates section. Scaling Loss of Material Evidence for the hands rather than the coffee table required accommodation for the artists’ more expansive works. Though the sewn binding is flexible, the gutter would still exact tribute from crossovers.

For works where that would be unacceptable, we built in gatefolds. There was no way to show Time Tunnel at a reasonable scale in a book of this size, but a single fold placed dead center is less jarring than losing most of the center square in the binding. In fact, finding the optimal way to accommodate Time Tunnel (together with a comfortable measure for the essay) formed the basis of the book’s proportions and architecture.

If you can swing it, adding a plate just for text can be more than a luxury: freeing the text from the black plate means that black is wholly given to process color, mitigating any density trade-offs between type and reproduction. Here, we also wanted to push the text back a bit, making the experience of reading a bit quieter. We specified a dark gray mixed with a dull base. Images were hit with a spot gloss varnish, moving them forward optically on the page.

Reprise of detail from I Used to Think I Knew Everyone (2017) from the book’s dust jacket.

Three levels of attention come into play in Loss of Material Evidence: a broad view of the exhibition (noted in figure 6); individual pieces, presented in full and in detail; and intimate details showing the tremendous amount of physical labor Inocencio and Smith put into the works.

Here, a happy coincidence in which the phase transition of Inocencio’s Waiting to Cry (2016) conveniently occurs in the gutter.

Whenever possible, we presented the artists’ work in relative proportion, as shown here and in figure 12, and with a common origin: note the floor and baseboard.

We also used gatefolds to show meaningful detail in the context of a particular work. This is Inocencio’s Bloom (2017).

Rather than presenting the artists’ CVs consecutively, we interwove them into a timeline consisting of two concurrent columns, deviating from the traditional section-based format (Education, Solo Exhibitions, etc.) with a system of icons. Inocencio’s chronology is in the left column, printed in process cyan; Smith’s is on the right, printed in process magenta. Collaborations (including children) are shown in a center column using both inks overprinted. Works from periods referenced in the timeline are shown on facing pages.