Tatiana Mesa Paján
Tatiana Mesa Paján is a process-based artist with a particular focus on poetic gesturesShe expresses her ideas across various media, including performance, installation, ready-made, printmaking, artist books, and poetic prose. The language she ultimately selects for her work varies, depending on questions of documentation and memory. While the forms of her artwork change, her sensibility remains rooted in archeological, anthropological, and linguistic studies. Her research is based on an archeology of her present, fascinated by human nature and subjectivity. She attempts to read the life experience through the lens of art, treating such experience as art material. The artist grapples with questions of documentation and the ethical implications of what is shared and what is hidden. She defines her pieces as poetic gestures that are often indeterminate, collections of everyday memories such as kissing, touching, walking, or any imaginable simple gestures. Some works may span a lifetime; while others are ongoing collections over many years. The Experience lived escapes, impossible to grasp. Any evoked experience is a memory built through the medium she chooses whether word, or installation. This limitation of attaining the real moment allows her to decide how she sees, remembers, and shares each life experience.
Tatiana Mesa Paján is an artist born in Havana, Cuba, who moved to the United States in 2013 and currently lives and works in Tampa, FL. Member and founder of The Department of Public Intervention in Havana (DIP), Mesa is co-curator of Experiencia de Acción: 30 días, 8th Havana Biennial, Havana (2003). Mesa's art has been displayed internationally in Cuba, Amsterdam, Barcelona, Madrid, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, Lithuania, and the United States. Her creative-writing prose has been published online and on paper in Cuba, Argentina, the United States, and Brazil. She graduated from San Alejandro Academy (1999), ISA in Havana (2004), and got her MFA at USF, Tampa (2022), where she is an Assistant Professor in the Printmaking Department. An artist of loneliness, influenced by situations and poet of everyday gestures, Mesa takes refuge in the collections of objects as the relics of experience. The items collected are seen as evidence of a conversation, touch, or memory with someone. To collect materials with the weight of her heart, lost things, mirrors, images related to the past, human hair, and sunken things as a coping memory mechanism.