Byrd (Daniel Maginnity) is a Canberra-based street artist known for his colourful murals and smaller site-specific installations.

The difficulty for any artist who works on a considerable scale in a public space and who then tries to commodify the art object for a boutique commercial art gallery is that many of the artistic strategies must be rethought and renegotiated. What appears as raw and vibrant when spanning a wall several metres across and dependent on natural daylight, when reduced to an easel-size object within the white cube of a gallery and professionally lit may come across as somewhat timid, neat and even a bit pretty. I have frequently lamented how the street posters that played such a major role in my adolescence now in the collections of the great public cultural institutions appear as lame, awkward and bombastic in their exaggerated and hollow rhetoric.

Byrd subscribes to the idea of using recycled materials for the basis of his art and to the philosophy that weathered and used surfaces carry within their fabric traces and echoes of their earlier lives. Like two other Canberra artists, the late Rosalie Gascoigne and the omnipresent Alex Asch, Byrd engages in an act of creative alchemy to transform and recontextualise the object, giving it a new appearance and a new narrative. He dominates his surfaces in a much more authoritarian manner than either Gascoigne or Asch, imposing his own visual paradigms, so that the material's earlier existence has not only been subverted, but frequently largely suppressed.

At the same time, in a piece like Flight spills (still life), 2017, where the reused five slats of wood have been almost completely covered with paint and a dead parrot forms the pathos and nucleus of the composition, bent rusty nails, which I assume belonged to the original materials, remain, making the object not user-friendly to children, pets or anyone else who unwittingly may touch the work.

There is a general sense of frivolity that runs throughout the exhibition with repetitive images of dogs, pelicans, swans, parrots and cats, and with frequent references to road kill and to the slaughter of our local wildlife under the ever-present tyre tracks. There is a mischievous and not too subtle humour as anthropomorphised hounds in high heels squat as they hang out in Adverbs of pandemic proportions. It is a fast-moving feast of visual punning, where the images and the materials that surround Byrd on the street serve as the source for his little invented ideographs.

Although Byrd is regarded in some quarters as a veteran Canberra graffiti artist who has been working in the scene for the best part of a couple of decades, he has over the years moved on from tagging and stickies to commissioned murals, painted bus shelters and now gallery art. It is a constant process of reinventing himself but, at the same time, retaining something of the original sense of inspiration and that adrenalin rush that occurs when putting up an image in a public space at the dead of night and hoping that no one sees you and you don't get caught.