Thomas Bils

Lives and works in Miami, FL, USA

Artist statement

Born and raised in central Florida before moving south to his current residence in Miami, Thomas Bils paints autobiographically in ongoing investigation into the precarious nature of the world and the banality of disaster. Reflecting on the absurdities he was accustomed to while growing up in the suburban south during the second wave opioid crisis, Thomas crafts images employing his role as the unreliable narrator to develop a fragmented reality where personal narratives intertwine with universal anxieties. Through obfuscation and semiotic sleights of hand, the viewer is refused total access to the narratives baked into the paintings and invited to instead meditate on the fragility of certainty. This encouragement towards a slow viewing reciprocates Bils’s interests in the phenomenon of noticing; where conceived assumptions melt away and a sense of jamais vu presents itself. The personal microcosm, in Bils's vision, is a delicate construct, forever on the precipice of collapse, where even the most mundane occurrences can hold profound existential significance.

Artwork