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PHOTO OPPORTUNITY  Where: Alfred Deakin Place, Police Lane, Ballarat Central   When: 5.30pm, Friday 29 November 2019 (Ballarat Fringe Benefits Festival)  Who: Smoking Ceremony and Welcome to Country by local elder, Deanne Gilson.  Official opening by Cr Ben Taylor, Mayor City of Ballarat  

Josh Muir’s work, Roots, is the first temporary artwork to be installed on the Gallery Annex Wall on the approach to Alfred Deakin Place, Police Lane in Ballarat Central. The space has been identified as an important site to host temporary pieces given that Alfred Deakin Place in the Ballarat CBD is commonly used as a place of discussion, engagement, protest and performance.   

With Gunditjamara and Yorta Yorta heritage, Josh grew up in Ballarat where he is well known for his fresh and contemporary take on indigenous art. Josh represents a growing group of First Nations peoples who are permanently settling in the city and bringing with them a vibrancy and a voice. Josh’s uses high contrast and strongly delineated characters to express his stories, all of which is fed by his experience as a street artist and his pleasure in providing art in public spaces.   

Josh was selected as the inaugural artist for the temporary public art space on the Gallery Annex Wall for 2020, a commission that was developed to coincide with the city-wide Fringe Benefits music and performance festival. Josh’s work will remain in place until November 2020 when a new artist will be selected.   

Roots is a powerful piece. The viewer’s experience with the work is a feeling that it is not negotiable. Containing the strong features of a traditional elder, Roots is the face of an ‘uncle’ looking out over humanity, community and Western society.   

Josh has a strong connection to his culture and is well known within the arts community both locally and nationally. His work Heaven’s Gates won the People’s Choice Award at the 2014 Victorian Indigenous Arts Awards, and in 2015 he won the Youth Award in the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Art Awards for his work Buninyong. 

In February 2016, his works were projected across the expansive facade of the National Gallery of Victoria for White Night Melbourne. Still Here, Josh’s White Night series, tells the story of Aboriginal people in Victoria before and since white settlement