Tappeto Volante Projects is pleased to open its new season in Brooklyn with The Artist as Practitioner: Offerings to the Nagas, organized by Matteo Callegari and featuring works by Callegari, Peter Makela, and Michela Martello. Presented in our Gowanus space and shared with Field of Play, the exhibition marks the start of a new season of parallel programs and collaborations between the two galleries.

Central to this shared interest in the exhibition as a space of inquiry is a framework that lets artists establish relationships between distinct practices, systems of knowledge, personal histories, and forms of experience. Callegari’s position as both participating artist and organizer is particularly significant within this context, challenging a strict separation between artistic production and curatorial thinking.

The Artist as Practitioner extends this inquiry by considering artistic practice in relation to spiritual discipline. Bringing together three artists who are practitioners within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism, the exhibition examines how spiritual practice may operate within contemporary art without becoming its subject or its illustration. Instead, practice becomes a structure through which making, intention, material, and attention intersect.

The Artist as Practitioner: Offerings to the Nagas

To live in harmony with the world, we must first stabilize our relationship with nature. In the Buddhist tradition, this stabilization is not metaphorical—it is understood as an active, reciprocal process that involves specific beings inhabiting the many realms of reality: beings that are intelligent, sentient, and responsive to human action.

Among the most important of these are the nagas: serpent-like entities that dwell in the earth and waters—the nagas are guardians of the natural world. When the relationship between humans and their environment is one of care and respect, the nagas bring healing and wisdom. The Prajnaparamita, the great teaching on transcendent knowledge, is itself said to have been preserved by the nagas and returned to humanity at the right moment. When that relationship breaks down, when we pollute the waters, destroy the soil, and disregard the living systems around us, the nagas respond: with sickness, with drought, with famine. They are not punishment but consequence, a direct reflection of the state of the world we have made.

This exhibition brings together three artists, Matteo Callegari, Peter Makela, and Michela Martello, all of whom are practitioners within the Nyingma school of Tibetan Buddhism. Their work did not begin as an illustration of this tradition. It emerged, independently and across different continents and cultures, from repeated encounters with the figure of the serpent: in mythology, in ritual, in the earth itself. The snake appears across traditions with a consistency that cannot be explained by coincidence. It is always liminal, always ancient, always double, carrying both poison and remedy, death and renewal, destruction and the knowledge that follows it.

If we accept that art does not come entirely from the conscious mind, that something passes through the artist from a place that cannot be fully named or located, then it becomes possible to understand these works as more than paintings or objects. They are, in the language of the tradition these artists share, offerings. Made not only for human viewers but for the beings of other realms, for the nagas themselves, as gestures of recognition, respect, and a desire to restore what has been broken between the human world and the world it depends on.

Each of the three artists in this exhibition maintains both an artistic practice and a spiritual practice. For all three, these are not separate activities: one merges into the other. What unites them is intention and awareness, the orientation of the mind at the moment of making, when a form is brought into being. In the Nyingma tradition, intention and awareness embedded deeply enough in the making of a work do not stay within the frame. They travel. They cross the boundary between what we can see and what we cannot.
- Matteo Callegari

We are pleased to invite you to visit our shared space in Gowanus, Brooklyn, as Tappeto Volante Projects and Field of Play inaugurate the new season together on September 12. Alongside The Artist as Practitioner: Offerings to the Nagas, Field of Play will present If Only the Light Could Stay, a two-person exhibition featuring Song Watkins Park and Ryan Oskin, winners of the 2026 Open Call. Both exhibitions will be on view from September 12 through October 4, 2026, creating a dialogue between two independent curatorial programs within our shared Brooklyn space.