After an eight year run on the premium cable network and streaming platform HBO/MAX, Brillo Box (3¢ off), the critically acclaimed documentary film by School of Theatre, Film & Television Professor Lisanne Skyler, is now having its first live screenings in Canada as part of the Pop Art exhibition, From Warhol to Banksy at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. Skyler’s film, which plays continuously during the run of the exhibition, tracks the surprising journey of an iconic Andy Warhol sculpture from her family’s living room to a record-breaking Christie’s auction.
Brillo Box (3¢ off) was an official selection of the New York Film Festival and was selected for the 89th Academy Awards short list of ten international films for consideration for a Best Short Subject nomination. After debuting on HBO in 2017, the film has been released on television and streaming networks in over 300 countries, amassing millions of viewers worldwide. In 2018-2019, the film was also part of Sweden’s Moderna Museet’s “Warhol 1968” exhibit. It has screened for the museum-going public at institutions such as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C and at private events at Christie’s headquarters in Chicago, Los Angeles and New York’s Rockefeller Center.
“I always encourage my students to tell personal stories, and this film has been a great example of how the universal lives in the specific, as it has reached many different international audiences from the art world to the mainstream. It’s wonderful to see Brillo Box (3¢ off) continue to draw a global audience and to share it with the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria community as part of “From Warhol to Banksy’,” said Skyler.
Brillo Box (3¢ off) blends family memoir with Pop Art history. In 1969, Skyler’s parents bought an Andy Warhol Brillo Box for $1,000. Exact replicas of the supermarket cartoon, Warhol’s Brillo Boxes were at first dismissed by the art world. Beloved by the Skyler family but ultimately traded for another artwork, the same sculpture went on to sell for $3,000,000 at a 2010 Christie’s auction, which prompted Skyler to explore how art objects shape family history and change in meaning over time.
A fiction and documentary writer and director, Skyler has also directed the Sundance-selected documentary No Loans Today, recently preserved by the UCLA Film & Television Archive, and the feature film Getting to Know You, starring Zach Braff, Heather Matarazzo and Bebe Neuwirth, which was an official selection of the Venice Film Festival and Sundance. Currently a University of Arizona Udall Fellow, Skyler is in post production on This Side of Midnight.
Brillo Box (3¢ off) screens at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria in British Columbia through April 27, alongside works by Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann, Takashi Murakami, Banksy, and Mr. Brainwash. Cinema Guild in New York handles distribution for the film which will be available again soon on digital platforms.
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