At the Charles H. Scott Gallery until April 23

Pardon Me tests our understanding of-and need for-privacy. The eight local and international artists represented in the exhibition employ everything from trespass to mimicry to unsolicited companionship as vehicles for travelling in the place where our public lives end and our private lives begin. In an era when cellphone users spill their guts on crowded buses and western governments spy on their own citizens, traditional notions of privacy and security are under attack.

As curator Cate Rimmer points out in an accompanying essay, most of the artists in this show make use of performance, including aspects of relational art (which focuses on human interactions and everyday acti?vities). This means that the photos, videotapes, letters, posters, postcards, and photocopies here are essentially documents of earlier actions and interventions.

For instance, London-based Shizuka Yokomizo left notes at a series of ground-floor apartments, requesting that their unknown occupants stand at their front windows at a specified time to be photographed. Three of her large, grainy, nighttime portraits-in which anonymity dances with vulnerability-are on view. Local artist Andrew Dadson videotaped himself trotting back and forth across the roofs of a line of Vancouver Specials, taking short leaps (all that was necessary) between them. Both projects question linked ideas of private space, private property, and sanctuary that inform western culture's sense of home.

In Crime of the Good/The Beach, Montreal-based Clément de Gaulejac "tidied up" the belongings of swimmers at the Paris Plage while they were in the water. Imagine how you would feel if, unbidden by you, a stranger folded and stacked your blankets and towels, closed your umbrella, put your sunglasses and suntan lotion into your beach bag, and deflated and rolled up your air mattress while you were swimming. In certain situations, society operates on the assumption that private belongings left in a public place will not be messed with-even benignly. De Gaulejac tugs that beach blanket out from under us. He also forces us to address the reasons we are so attached to our personal effects.

Londoner Mathew Sawyer undertakes legally dubious acts of communication. In It'll all come out in the wash, he slipped anonymous notes into the pockets of strangers, most of them encountered on public transit. These notes quoted lines from pop music, such as "Sometimes I feel so happy", from "Pale Blue Eyes" by the Velvet Underground. Far more contentious is Sawyer's removing a business letter from a friend's neighbour's mailbox, steaming it open, adding a postscript-poignant, anecdotal, utterly inappropriate-then resealing and replacing it. While threading private aspects of one person's life into another's, the piece provokes our anxieties around government surveillance, intercepted communications, and trespass. It's very uncomfortable.

Less intrusive, yet treading either side of the line between intimacy and public disclosure, is Jana Leo's Love Letter Project. The Spanish artist invited strangers she encountered in the street to work with writers in her studio to compose love letters they might not otherwise be able to craft themselves. Because participation was voluntary and because in many instances the names of the recipients have been blacked out (photocopies of 10 letters are available in the gallery), there is an air of kindly collaboration to this undertaking.

Vancouver-based Ron Tran also approached strangers in the street, late at night, and asked if he might walk them home and photograph them, pitching fear of criminal intent against willingness to trust. Less collaboratively, he sat a few tables away from a stranger in a fast-food restaurant and mimicked the other's movements and gestures. (The whole performance was caught by video camera.) Again, Tran punctures the invisible veil of privacy we wear in public places. He undermines the assumption that we will be ignored.

Local artists Hadley + Maxwell have undertaken a series of installations within the homes of art-community members, temporarily remaking interior rooms in ways that reflect their owners' interests and aspirations. Although these installations or make-overs are always consensual, not all participants are equally forthcoming with the details of their private lives. In Decor Project: A Room for Thought, Hadley + Maxwell ran long strands of twine and string in crisscrossing webs within the house shared by a woman whose interests were fibre arts and words and a man suffering from Pick's disease, a dementing disorder. As revealed in a letter posted alongside photos of the installation, the artists discovered important aspects of the lives of their make-over subjects through "research"-again stomping across the line between private situations and public knowledge.

Because of the conceptual nature of many of the projects represented here, more explanatory text would have been helpful. Still, Pardon Me is a bright, timely, and stimulating exhibition set on the fast-eroding beach of personal privacy.