Justina Dziama, A Millimeter of Space

Justina Dziama is the 2020 Activism in the Arts Artist-in-Residence at Buffalo Arts Studio where her new body of work, A Millimeter of Space, will be exhibited January 22–March 6, 2021. Dziama is an artist and architect who has used her residency to research the economically distressed East Side neighborhood that surrounds the Tri-Main Center, a former factory that houses Buffalo Arts Studios. Deindustrialization and disinvestment of the 20th century hit Buffalo’s East Side neighborhood especially hard. As a result, these buildings exhibit the temporal qualities of dilapidation and decay. Dziama’s process captures the layers of surface deterioration through a series of hyperphysical castings fabricated from latex that vary in color and texture, all the while remaining reflective of human scale. Once removed, the castings form palimpsests that bear the physical traces of continuously changing social, environmental, and economic conditions of this decaying architecture serve as a metaphor for the cultural and community blight caused by loss of manufacturing jobs as well as discriminatory economic practices.