Thomas Bils

Thomas Bils (b. 1993, Central Florida; lives and works in Miami) creates paintings that probe the slippery terrain between memory, truth, and narrative. Drawing from his upbringing in the suburban South during the early years of the opioid crisis, Bils isolates the ordinary objects and gestures that linger in recollection—a mousetrap, a figurine tagged for sale, a gun holstered too casually, bathroom tile, a handwritten note. Rendered with heightened clarity, these images operate as psychological artifacts: mundane, humorous, ominous, and unexpectedly tender. His work embraces the idea that life is built from small, cumulative moments—fascinating, boring, and complex—and, like a Proustian trigger, the banalities he paints open onto a semi-fictional American interiority where personal memory and collective experience intertwine.

Adopting the role of the unreliable narrator, Bils constructs scenes that feel both documentary and staged, capturing liminal moments where something has just happened or is about to occur. Through this tension between the ordinary and the existential, his paintings reveal how the everyday objects that surround us hold the weight of vulnerability, precarity, and the fragility of certainty.