Design by Morning Breath

Morning Breath is Doug Cunningham and Jason Noto. The two first met in 1996 at Think Skateboards in San Francisco where they worked together in the design department and began a style of collaborating that would take them into the next decade. After moving east they formalized their partnership in 2002 and established Morning Breath, Inc., a boutique studio located in Brooklyn, NY. Gradually their work grew beyond designing skate and snowboard graphics and expanded to include music packaging, apparel, posters and advertising. These days Doug and Jason split their energy and time between commercial and personal work. Over the last decade Morning Breath has been worked on Hundreds of projects, nominated for a Grammy Award, showcased in numerous design books and publications, and have been invited to display and discuss their work around the globe. Most recently The two just showcased a few new pieces at the Fountain Art Fair as part of 2012 Art Basel Miami Beach, and our also collaborating with many skate/snowboard, and apparel companies for the 2013-2014 seasons. About our personal work: Breathing life into discarded visual ephemera from popular culture, Morning Breath resurrects outmoded imagery to produce artwork that is new and original, yet eerily familiar.  Morning Breath’s art practice is a multilayered system of collage on wood that begins with an initial image or typeface which is then built on by continually adding elements until a final image emerges.  Figures and objects are appropriated from old advertisements, divorced of their original intent as marketing devices and reconfigured into original compositions by the Manos Extrañas or “strange hands” of Doug Cunningham and Jason Noto. Devoid of narrative, human figures stand adrift in the stratified picture plane. Originally manifested as pawns in the free market strategy of “off” Madison Avenue. Madison Avenue’s stealth psychological manipulation, are now delivered to the viewer in a juxtaposition with religious and pop culture iconography creating a new kind of psychological mirage where the dream-like world of the subconscious emerges out of the recycled mundanity of everyday life.