SHOP windows in the CBD will come alive this week as weird and wacky installations take over.

Thousands of lit-up ping-pong balls, giant bubbles and painted mechanical wheels will be used by city traders to attract passers-by as part of the annual Look.Stop.Shop exhibition.

Boutique fashion store Obus on Flinders Lane will join 28 other shops taking part in the exhibition.

Designer Shayli Harrison, 22, said she was given free rein to create something eye-catching at Obus.

“Some people find it quite startling but I wanted to create something bright that tied in with people riding around in Melbourne, which is quite beautiful,” Harrison said.

Her bright sculpture, which she describes as “metal flowers,” combines ten fluoro bike wheels with metal eyes.

Maps found at stateofdesign.com.au will direct crowds to all of the shop installations around Melbourne.

The moving displays end July 31.

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ARTISTS from Thornbury and Alphington are among finalists in Australia’s richest art prize for young people.

Alphington’s Tom Gibbs, 21, and Thornbury’s Ben Howe, 34, have been selected in the final 25 to contest the $50,000 Metro Gallery Art Award for artists under 35.

They were shortlisted from hundreds of entries, with the winner to be announced by ex-premier Jeff Kennett on July 26.

“Just to be a finalist in such a well-known award and have the opportunity to exhibit my work is wonderful,” Gibbs said.

A fine art student at Victorian College of the Arts, he entered a self-portrait in oils.

“My work explores the notion of human being versus human doing. The question is, at what point does that productivity that aids existence define that existence?

“In a society where my worth is directly linked to what I produce, what does it mean to simply be?”

Gibbs moved from Adelaide to Melbourne to work with homeless people for the Salvation Army.

“I’d had a sheltered upbringing and wanted to experience harsh realities.”

Howe, who is studying a Master of Fine Art at RMIT, entered an oil and acrylic painting titled Time and The Elastic, painted with overlapping layers of paint to show the passing of time from one moment to the next.

The exhibition runs until July 30 at the Metro Gallery, 1214 High St, Armadale.

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TREE prunings will be collected from inner-city homes and fed to Melbourne Zoo’s elephants under a radical recycling plan.

The Parkville zoo is offering to send horticulturalists to properties to cut and collect branches and plants that are compatible with the diets of its seven elephants.

Two four-tonne trucks will patrol the streets on Tuesdays and Fridays to identify appropriate tree and plant species.

Simon Andrews from the zoo’s horticulture department said elephants loved to snack on species such as bamboo, acacia, elm and the appropriately named elephant grass.

He said the five adults and two calves had such voracious appetites – consuming dozens of two-metre long branches each week as well as fruit, hay and lucerne – that it was difficult for staff to keep up with demand. He said the gentle giants also used the greenery for bedding in their enclosure.

“This is partly a call for help, as we need as many branches as we can get our hands on,” Mr Andrews said.

The City of Melbourne’s sole Greens’ councillor, Cathy Oke, said the zoo’s plan would neatly complement the council’s own recycling program. The council collects a maximum of two cubic metres of green waste for every property each month.

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There are plenty of piano-moving horror stories, precious pianos getting jammed in tight spots, being damaged beyond repair. Consider your back and the poor piano, think about leaving the move in the hands of the professionals.

For piano teacher Heather Hobbs, moving home involves an additional stress — the transporting of her two pianos, which are not only the tools of her trade but also her precious art objects. But so far, so good.

"It’s not as traumatic as you might expect it to be," Heather says. "We only ever had trouble once. We were moving into a place with stairs and the removalists didn’t send enough people. I had a big, old German piano and they couldn’t physically carry it. They were about to drop it, and my husband had to step in quickly to save it. The problem was that the removalists didn’t have a proper piano trolley — they were carrying it on leather straps."

When Heather last moved, she engaged a removalist who not only had the necessary equipment but was also properly covered by insurance.

"In our last house my studio door was opposite the staircase and the removalists had to turn the piano on its side to get it out. I was worried that everything would move inside the instrument, but the technicians knew what they were doing and there were no problems. That’s the advantage of using a proper removalist."

Jessica Merlo of Melbourne-based Piano Moves says that by using a non-specialist to move their piano home owners risk delays on moving day.

"Every day we get people ringing us because they’ve got a settlement deadline of 2:00 p.m. and they’re stuck with their piano because the furniture removalists are unable to move it. The removalist has promised to move it over the phone, without looking at it. Then they turn up and the instrument is bigger or heavier than they realised, there are steps, or it as to go up or down stairs, and they say they can’t move it.

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