Tappeto Volante Projects is proud to offer curatorial and artist residencies:
Curatorial Residencies
Jeffrey Morabito: Pareidolia: Ideas Paradise
Jeffrey Morabito is a NYC based painter that depicts subjects as signifiers of a greater meaning in what society values or discards in what he refers to as “Psychic Landscapes”. Born in Bronxville, half Hong Kongese and half Italian, he spent his early years traveling between New York and Hong Kong. He returned to Asia in 2006, to apprentice with a calligraphy master in Seoul, South. Korea. This allowed Morabito’s painting to be reevaluated down to individual brush strokes. He then spent six years in Beijing, beginning with a Red Gate Gallery Residency, in 2009, while teaching art at Capital Normal University. Morabito returned to New York in 2016 to pursue an MFA at the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting, and Sculpture, which he completed in 2016. During the 2020 lockdown, Morabito started the artist interview podcast “I Know Strange People” as an exploration of the unconventional in the creative process.
Ksenia M. Soboleva: This Has Happened
Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York-based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation titled "Fragments: Art, AIDS, and Lesbian Identity in the United States." Her writings have appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, BOMB Magazine, Hyperallergic, art-agenda, and various exhibition catalogs. She has curated exhibitions at Candice Madey Gallery, La MaMa Galleria, and Assembly Room. Soboleva was the 2020-2021 Vilcek Curatorial Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. She is currently the Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Gender and LGBTQ+ History at the New York Historical Society, and Adjunct Professor of Art History at New York University.
Jackie Shatz, Celeste Morton: Animal People
Curated by Jackie Shatz, Celeste Morton and Tappeto Volante, the group exhibition, Animal People, aims to reflect the symbolic representation of the interrelationship between animals and humans through mythology, spirituality, wilderness, and domesticity in contemporary society, exploring the paradigm of co-inhabitants in their shared environment. Acting as symbols, shown as both friend and antagonist, often embodying human characteristics or telling stories of mutual dependence, the interaction of humans and animals reveals a transformative relationship.
Lisha Bai, Studio Archive Project: Jump Shot
With Jump Shot, curator Lisha Bai brings together eight artists – Ben K. Voss, Marianne Gagnier, Calvin Burton, Maria Walker, Al Svoboda, Julie Torres, Christopher Peterson, and David Scanavino – whose works in abstraction result from well-honed skills and material expertise being informed and inflected by practices involving experimentation, chance, repetition, impulse, unforeseeable outcomes, and material and process-related improvisation. Working in a range of mixed media approaches to painting, these artists let instinct and intuition guide the way, loosening their hands and minds in their treatments of surfaces, layerings of color, gestural marks, and arrangements of compositional forms.
Benjamin Klein: These Dreams
Benjamin Klein was born in Chicago and grew up in Montreal, Quebec. His paintings depict a rich but ambiguous landscape of dreamlike scenery and characters. Hallucinatory colors, strange environments, and unexplained scale shifts inhabit the space as much as do the figures themselves, who interact and confront one another in quietly poetic, charged psychodramas. Dread and longing, fear and ecstasy are present here, but also slapstick and silliness, a species of tragicomic drama in the painting. Klein lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.
Artist Residencies
Nic Koller — Oct - Nov 2020
Nic Koller is a multidisciplinary artist whose works explore the outer-boundaries of collage. Regardless of the medium, Nic depicts common people and places as representations of people while embracing spontaneous, collaborative moments as the foundation of their process. Over the last 2 years, Nic has merged their video & painting practices in an attempt to create new images, moving paintings that combine digital and analog forms. Nic curates for Straight Through the Wall, a guerrilla Arts Collective that projects video art onto walls throughout NYC, and cartoons about art and technology for the New Yorker. In January of 2020, Nic’s first VR film, Flowers & a Switchblade, premiered at Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Exhibition.
Nic Koller, Backlit, 2020, Acrylic with projection on canvas, 62 x 42 inches
Nic Koller, Microwave My Brain, 2020, Acrylic with projection on canvas, 40 x 62 inches
Nic Koller, This Bulb Never Burns Out, 2020, Acrylic with projection on canvas, 32 x 28 inches