NO sooner has Canadian contemporary artist Ian Kirkpatrick moved to York than he is already holding his first exhibition at Bar Lane Studios.

Hurry, however, because Ornamentalism has only a short run that began on February 22 and ends on Friday.

Ian and his wife, Dr Sara Perry, have left Southampton for York after Sara took up a lecturing post in the University of York’s archaeology department upon graduating from her PhD course.

“I’ve been living here for only two weeks so far, and we’ll be here for at least two years, and I can honestly say it’s the first British city I’ve really connected with,” says 35-year-old Ian, by profession a graphic artist with clients in North America and increasingly in Britain too.

Ian had studied for a fine art degree at the University of Victoria in British Columbia but lost interest because “what was going on in the art scene didn’t seem to mesh with my thoughts, so me and art stopped being friends”.

He pursued a career in commercial graphic art in Vancouver, working for the Centre for Addiction Research, for which he would make products, a motif that informs his own artwork.

Turning freelance on moving to Southampton in 2008, he has since combined graphic art commissions for the likes of the Catalhoyuk archaeological summer project in Turkey with doing his own artwork.

Once in York, he called in to enquire about the possibility of taking up a studio at Bar Lane and sent a portfolio of his work to Danny Cameron at the studios. Although Ian ended up taking a studio at Patrick Studio in Leeds, nevertheless Danny alerted him to the short-notice availability of an exhibition run at Bar Lane, knowing that Ian had more than enough material to put on a show straightaway.

And here it is: a show called Ornamentalism that draws on classical and contemporary iconography to produce intricate surfaces reflecting modern-day myths.

In a nutshell, Ian decorates common objects such as cardboard boxes, paper plates and aluminium street signs as a way to explore Western society’s fears, fantasies and narratives.

“I chose the title Ornamentalism as I was trying to find something that advertised that the theme of surfaces runs through the show. I also work with containers and my art deals with pattern and imagery and ornament – and I also like the fact there’s a book called Orientalism by Edward Said,” says Ian.

“I just liked the play on words that also hinted at a more theoretical underpinning of my inspiration coming from a lot of different sources, not all of them Western based.”

Classical Greek imagery, the words of Dostoevsky and echoes of Andy Warhol’s Pop Art all feature in works that vary from Vessel, a fully functioning wine box (used for such a purpose on the launch night), to the folding toy box We Have Never Been Modern.

The newest piece, the sign Danger Lies Forgetting, features President Obama in an echo of Robert Rauschenberg’s Retroactive I image of a finger-pointing President Kennedy. For all Ian’s talk of surface, this sign has a multitude of resonances, from WB Yeats to William Blake, Space Invader games to Francis Bacon, Kennedy to the riddle of the Sphinx.

“I like that interplay between surface and content,” says Ian. “Surface sometimes get a band name, but there’s so much visual information in the world that you can use to make your images and messages.”

Ian Kirkpatrick’s Ornamentalism exhibition runs at Bar Lane Studios, Bar Lane, York, until Friday, open 9am to 5pm.