An uneasy trip through America's cultural past

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Jamie Shovlin made his name with a meticulous and elaborate hoax. Creating an archive of drawings, diary entries, letters and newspaper clippings, he traced the life and disappearance of a 13-year-old fledgling artist called Naomi V Jelish. It was a work that managed to be both haunting and absurd and Charles Saatchi, for one, admitted that it had had him fooled - at least until it dawned that the young artist's name was in fact an anagram of Shovlin's own. Still, it impressed him enough to buy it.

A Dream Deferred at the Haunch Of Venison's three-storey gallery is a less persuasive work. It attempts to take us on an uneasy trip through America's recent cultural past - as filtered through the mindset of a soft rock-obsessed kid growing up in English suburbia - and is a work of many confusing parts.

There are paintings of record sleeves; a pile of Crayola-ed wax limbs; fictional letters to Theodore Kaczynski, the 1990s Unabomber; and a 1969 Life magazine feature on the killing of Sharon Tate.

Tim Buckley provides the soundtrack but, as the vinyl of his Starsailor album spins, a breezeblock attached to a pulley threatens to crush it.

Long before the external threats of Islamism, America, he suggests, was always at odds with its idealistic self-image. Sadly, this commonplace observation fails to find much resonance in this muddle of an exhibition. Fisun G¸ner

Until Aug 18, Haunch Of Venison, 6 Haunch Of Venison Yard W1, Mon to Sat 10am to 6pm (Thu to 7pm, Sat to 5pm), free. Tel: 020 7495 5050. Tube: Bond Street

Jamie Shovlin: A Dream Deferred
Haunch Of Venison
New Bond Street, W1S 1ST