Tatiana Mesa Paján: MÍO/MINE
Date: January 16, 2026 - February 22, 2026
Gallery: Douglas Whitley Gallery
Tatiana Mesa Paján: MÍO/MINE is a solo exhibition that begins with a simple but charged gesture: packing a suitcase and carrying a home with you, knowing you may never return. Rooted in the experience of diaspora, the exhibition reflects on what it means to own, carry, and remember when movement itself becomes permanent and possessions are always provisional.
Using found objects, Mesa Paján explores how memory and identity attach themselves to everyday things. Each object once belonged to someone else and arrives with its own history. Flowers become pigment, mirrors transform into handmade islands, and fragile dandelions are carefully preserved through acts of devotion and time. Some works are the result of decades of collecting, while others begin forming the moment the exhibition opens, emphasizing process, impermanence, and change.
Throughout MÍO/MINE, domestic objects become sites of tension: between public and private, past and present, home and elsewhere, authenticity and imitation. Mesa Paján asks us to consider how objects pass through many lives, accumulating touch and meaning along the way. As part of the exhibition, the artist intervenes with ten objects borrowed from community members, returning them at the exhibition’s close—an act that underscores care, trust, and temporary belonging.
Ultimately, MÍO/MINE invites visitors to reflect on a quiet but persistent question: what is truly ours? In spaces we briefly occupy and through objects we momentarily claim, Mesa Paján reveals ownership not as permanence, but as a fleeting relationship, one shaped by memory, movement, and shared use.
Tatiana Mesa Paján
Tatiana Mesa Paján is a Cuban-born, Tampa-based artist whose process-driven practice spans performance, installation, ready-mades, printmaking, artist books, and poetic prose. Rooted in archaeology, anthropology, and language, her work explores memory, documentation, and the ethics of what is revealed or concealed. Mesa defines her art as “poetic gestures” drawn from everyday experiences—walking, touching, kissing—that become evidence of lived time. She co-founded The Department of Public Intervention in Havana and co-curated Experiencia de Acción: 30 días at the 8th Havana Biennial (2003). Her work has been exhibited internationally across Europe, Latin America, and the United States, and her prose published widely. Mesa studied at San Alejandro Academy, ISA in Havana, and earned her MFA from USF, where she now teaches printmaking.
