Shop Talk is a unique installation of drawings and painting focusing on process and repetition, resulting in a large-scale painting filling an entire gallery wall.

Alex Zubryn’s practice articulates meaning about community life and suburbia, specifically through visually recording the streets in relation to still life/objects such as commercial products, decorative artifacts, edible objects and ephemera.

In recent times, recognisable Melbourne urban locales have been significantly reconstructed. Vibrant individual shops containing objects representing diverse cultures are under threat from gentrification. Shop Talk explores artefacts from just such a shop. Viewed from the street, the entire double fronted windows are filled with shelving structures with a random display of objects ranging from garden dwarfs to religious effigies. Decorative items stacked, wrapped and facing various directions are relic-like forms waiting for interpretation.

The artist’s personal background and associations propelled him to rethink the focus for selected objects and to create different narratives about them. Looking through the dusty windowpane gives a sense of peering into old windows of an apartment block. Each decorative item has an individual temperament and appears as a character within its particular frame. The still life/objects and the expressive materiality of the mediums investigated sheds light on ways to narrate suburban culture, ethnicity and the process of gentrification.