A Light for a Feather

Tappeto Volante is pleased to present A Light for a Feather, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Marco DaSilva. The exhibition inaugurates a renewed phase of Tappeto Volante's Brooklyn program. Following the gallery's recent expansion to Tribeca, the gallery returns to the intimate front room of its Gowanus space, reengaging the scale and immediacy that characterized its earliest exhibitions. The contiguous gallery will be the new home of Field of Play, a fellow artist-run space and longstanding presence within the neighborhood. Together, the two organizations establish a shared site dedicated to artistic exchange, experimentation, and community. In A Light for a Feather, DaSilva presents mosaic assemblages that draw upon personal memory, diasporic experience, spirituality, popular culture, and queer histories. Through these varied forms, the artist constructs densely layered compositions that dissolve distinctions between the sacred and the everyday, autobiography and collective experience. Born and raised in New York City within a Brazilian-American family, DaSilva approaches objects as vessels of memory and transformation. Found materials, devotional imagery, urban iconography, and fragments gathered through travel and lived experience are assembled into intricate visual structures that function simultaneously as archive, offering, and self-portrait. Across the exhibition, acts of collecting and recombination become strategies for preserving histories, constructing meaning, and articulating forms of belonging. DaSilva's work is informed by forms of coded language and cultural transmission. His compositions explore the interstices between popular iconography, the signage and visual vernacular that shape New York City's neighborhoods, and the religious and pagan traditions that inform both the artist's Brazilian heritage and the broader cultural fabric of the city. References to Afro-Brazilian spiritual practices, Catholic iconography, queer visual cultures, and urban symbolism coexist within a symbolic universe shaped by migration, desire, ancestry, and survival. Entering the exhibition, viewers may experience the gallery as a kind of contemporary shrine: a space where disparate histories, beliefs, and visual traditions converge. DaSilva's assemblages evoke New York itself as a site of continual cultural exchange, where identities are formed through the encounter of multiple communities, faiths, rituals, and vernacular expressions. Through these layered constellations of images and objects, the artist proposes identity as fluid, multifaceted, and continuously assembled. The exhibition's title, A Light for a Feather, evokes a poetic gesture of offering and transformation. Throughout the exhibition, viewers encounter works that invite sustained attention, revealing unexpected relationships between objects, images, and histories while tracing the emotional and cultural geographies that have shaped the artist's practice. With this exhibition, Tappeto Volante reaffirms its commitment to artist-centered programming and to fostering experimental practices within Brooklyn's vibrant cultural landscape. Marco DaSilva is a Brazilian-American multimedia artist based in New York City whose practice spans painting, drawing, and assemblage. Drawing upon personal mythology, spirituality, and lived experience, he creates richly symbolic works that explore identity through the intersecting lenses of race, queerness, and mental health. DaSilva received a BFA in Painting and Drawing from SUNY New Paltz and an MBA from Hunter College. He has exhibited at venues including the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, Abrons Arts Center, and the Bureau of General Services—Queer Division, and was an Artist-in-Residence at The Arts Center at Governors Island in 2021 and 2026.

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126 13th St, Brooklyn

Brooklyn, NY