Marco DaSilva
Solo Show

Tappeto Volante is pleased to announce A Light for a Feather, a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Marco DaSilva, opening on Friday, July 11, from 6 to 8 PM at the gallery's Brooklyn location at 126 13th Street.

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 an artist whose symbol-based works explore hybridity through the intersections of painting and craft. His mosaics explore camouflage and syncretism, combining symbols from American culture, Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian deities, and queer histories into hybrid works that treat objects as relics. His graphic style fuses glass, objects, and mortar to create his own mythology, offering a richly saturated landscape of his world to the viewer. DaSilva has exhibited at FIERMAN, The Latinx Project at NYU, Beverly’s at Untitled Art Fair (Miami, FL), and Feria Material (CDMX, Mexico), with solo exhibitions at the Bureau of General Services – Queer Division and Abrons Arts Center. He was an artist-in-residence at the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council’s Art Center Residency (Governors Island, NY), a fellow for Queer|Art|Mentorship (New York, NY), and is currently a Garden Project Fellow for Ankhlave Arts Alliance. He holds a BFA from SUNY New Paltz and an MFA from CUNY Hunter College.