The Box invites you to an evening of readings, performance, tableau, film and music by: Brian Fawcett, Heather Frise, Amy Lam and Zeesy Powers, Maria Legault with Greg Walloch, Permafrown, Metanet Software, Ken Sparling and Scott Treleaven. We hope to see you there at 8 pm on Wednesday, June 28 at the Rivoli, 332 Queen W. Hosted by Louise Bak

The Box is a quarterly salon night of readings, performances, screenings, interventions and networking that aims to bring diverse communities and audiences into an environment of artistic and social intermingling.

Brian Fawcett was born in Prince George, B.C., Canada in 1944. He worked as a community organizer and urban planner in Greater Vancouver until 1985, and then taught in maximum security federal prisons for six years. He also had a short career as a professional hockey player, but now writes full time. He is a past editor of Books in Canada, a former columnist for the Globe & Mail, past chair of the Writers Union of Canada’s Free Trade and Charter 94 Committees and has written articles and reviews for most of Canada’s major newspapers and magazines. He is a founding editor of the internationally-followed Internet news service, www.dooneyscafe.com, and has lived in Toronto since 1991. His most recent books are Virtual Clearcut: Or, The Way Things Are In My Home Town, and Local Matters: A Defense of Dooney’s Café and Other Non-globalized Places, People and Ideas, both published in 2003. Virtual Clearcut won the 2004 Pearson Prize for non-fiction and was called “one of the best non-fiction books to ever come out of this country.” by Toronto’s Now Magazine. He hasn’t published poetry since 1983.

Heather Frise is primarily a documentary film and video maker. She also works as a teacher, editor and occasionally as a DOP. She recently moved from Vancouver to Toronto.. She has made several video documentaries, including Military Girls, Elegant Touch, My Mother's Father and The Road Stops Here: The Walbran Valley ( first prize winner at the 11th Environmental Film Festival of Szbajac, Hungary). Most recently she has worked as a video instructor at the Gulf Islands Film and Television School, on Galiano Island, Canada.

Amy Lam is proprietor/owner/founder of the Up and Down All Year Long Subscription Service, a monthly mailing of ephemera and other tiny objects to select paying patrons in the year of 2006. She will also do stand-up comedy in extreme conditions, if asked. She lives in Toronto.

Zeesy Powers is an interdisciplinary artist living in Toronto, Canada. Primarily a visual artist, she has trained in dance, theatre and music from an early age. She has performed for middle schools, comedy clubs, concerts, galleries, theatre and performance art festivals and science lectures. Her videos have been screened in several Canadian cities, and she has exhibited her holographic work at the Ontario Science Centre. In the spring of 2006 she will be performing in Austria and the Czech Republic for the 7th annual Anymous Art Festival. Zeesy maintains a web site at http://zeesy.wearepeopletoo.org.

Maria Legault is an inter-disciplinary artist that has coated her face in bubble gum, been hidden in clouds of blue cotton candy and stuffed crevices with pink icing. She holds a BFA from Concordia University and a MFA from the University of Guelph. Her work has been exhibited internationally in such venues as Mercer Union, Inter-Access, Forest City Gallery, YYZ, Toronto Free Gallery, 7a11d Performance Festival, Toronto Alternative Art Fair International and The Drake Hotel in Canada as well as the Galapagos Art Space in New York and the Castle of the Imagination performance festival in Poland. She is a member of Articipation, an art collective that promotes whimsical urban intervention. Maria was given the "Best Emerging Artist Award" at the Untitled Art Awards in Toronto, 2005. She currently resides in Toronto where she eats too much sugar and makes art sometimes.

Permafrown began as a two piece in 2003. Robin Fry ( keyboard, guitar and vocals) and Amy Bowles (keyboards, guitar, recorder and vocals) were freaking out finding whimsical adventures echoing in every turned snail shell. Stories were put to music and performed to a few people in rooms around Toronto. In 2004 Mike Leblanc (drums) joined. Permafrown is a terrifying and hypnotic psychedelic adventure. The songs exist in a dimension concocted of lonely kings, enamel trumpets, and desert hermits watching their toenails grow.

Metanet Software is comprised of 2 individuals: Raigan Burns and Mare Sheppard. They met in 1998 and discovered that when they combine their efforts, they are able to transform into a rather large robot made up of small mechanical cats. Raigan Burns n (1889): a set that is closed under two commutative binary operations and that can be described by any of various systems of postulates all of which can be deduced from the postulates that an identity element exists for each operation, that each operation is distributive over the other, and that for every element in the set there is another element which when combined with the first under one of the operations yields the identity element of the other operation. Mare Sheppard is a game developer and digital artist from Toronto with a penchant for things Japanese. She's got literally a ton of interests, which have too much mass to list.

Ken Sparling's most recent book, For Those Whom God Has Blessed With Fingers, was published by Pedlar Press in 2005. His other books are Dad Says He Saw You at the Mall (Knopf, 1996), an untitled novel (Pedlar, 2003) and a hand-made book, available by special order, called Hush Up and Listen Stinky Poo Butt.

Scott Treleaven is a Toronto-born artist, filmmaker and writer, best known for his cult film THE SALiVATION ARMY, which the Village Voice called one of the most notable underground films of 2002. His art practice is represented by galleries in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York, and incorporates collage, film, installation and photography. 2006 will see the release of The Salivation Army Black Book (Printed Matter Inc., NY), a compilation of Treleaven’s writings, zines, and collages over the past 10 years.

There will be door treats provided by: Aporia Records Inc, Attack Records, Broken Pencil, Canadian Art, Cinemascope, Coach House Books, Come As You Are, DC Books, ideas, Brian Fawcett, Infiltration, Kissmachine, Amy Lam, Maria Legault, Mercer Union, Metanet, Pages, Pedlar Press, Prefix Photo, Zeesy Powers, Random House, Severance Package Productions, Sheeba Music, Smut Magazine, Fiona Smyth, Snob Shop, Tasman Richardson, Take One, This Ain’t the Rosedale Library, Toro, Torpor Vigil and more.

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