KEVIN Kelly's original exhibitions were with Blue Funk, the experimental art collective that emerged from NCAD in the late 1980s and numbered in its ranks one of this year's Irish representatives at the Venice Biennale, Jaki Irvine. The Blue Funk connection ought to give Kelly the benefit of the doubt, but Return to the Edge, the artist's first solo show, is characterised by so much prevarication that scepticism soon takes over.

Kelly is currently resident in Glasgow, and it shows. His approach is to drop pieces into the gallery space in the studiedly casual manner of for example, a Christine Borland. The objects themselves fall halfway between found pieces and hastily made sculptural objects. In either case the flavour is that of junky bric-a-brac, left lying around the gallery space.

Most of Kelly's objects seem to cower at the gallery's edge with profound embarrassment. A shoddily mounted photo-image simply leans against a wall, as though it does not even have the nerve to hang on it. A manure-coloured cast, pretending to be fossilised life, cowers in a box, while a B-movie prop of a globe squats in the centre of the space. A framed fragment of text seems to refer to a saw leaning in an opposite corner, but only snidely to cancel out its temptation to become communicative.

Return to the Edge is trap sprung, an attempt at being blase that proves ruinously revealing. Kelly might like viewers to watch themselves making meaning from these scraps, but it is hard not to get distracted, hard not to watch instead the artist leaving clumsily and noisily by the back door. Those shadowy little spaces between hardline inscrutability and simple, old-fashioned in promising territory for a disciplined explorer, but they have clearly proved treacherous for one poorly equipped tourist.