Visual art

Kutlug Ataman

Harris Museum, Preston

4 / 5

A recent sociological study concluded that Orange County, California, is officially the happiest place on Earth. The Turner-nominated Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman interviewed a cross-section of the county's supremely contented inhabitants for an installation work, Paradise.

The subjects appear as an animated frieze spread across a horizontal bank of monitors. The effect is rather like one of William Frith's social panoramas, though with surfers, actors and cosmetic surgeons in place of crinolines and bathing huts.

Ataman suggests that the viewer should exercise their own form of "non-linear editing". What this means is that you flit around as if in a speed-dating session, attempting to establish as quickly as possible whether each person is worth persisting with, or is completely insane. One young woman seems pleasant enough, until she begins to describe driving round Atlantis "where they have, like, cell phones and swimming pools, the same as us". Swimming pools? In Atlantis?

There is a man with brown paper hair who likes dressing up as characters from Norman Rockwell paintings; a television evangelist who founded a glass cathedral in an earthquake zone; and the world's oldest working clown who wonders why children find him frightening. (Because he's bloody terrifying, that's why.)

It may be the happiest place on Earth, but as the gibbering antics of the Laguna Beach Yogic Laughter Club indicate, there is nothing more desperate than the sound of forced laughter.

· Until April 26. Details: 01772 258248.

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