Collect
Thomas Bils
Varsity Death Squad, 2020
Oil on panel
10 x 8 inches
$500
All proceeds go directly to the artist. Oolite Arts is not involved in the transaction process.
Thomas Bils was born in 1993 in Melbourne, Florida. He moved to Miami to study painting at New World School of The Arts, receiving a BFA in 2017. Thomas continues to live and work in Miami as an artist in residence for Bakehouse Art Complex. Bils’s paintings are a result of his interests over the epistemology of memory and the ontology of its subjects, using his adolescence in central Florida as the base position of introspection. Working in photoreferential oil painting he accesses the mnemonic properties of the photograph and translates the image as an act of nostalgic contemplation. During the translation process Thomas assumes the role of an unreliable narrator, embellishing details and events to leave the image with narratorial unease. This falsification accounts for the deteriorating truths of a reconsolidating memory. In depicting his home of Florida he employs nontraditional signifiers with the intention of inciting a sense of belonging and common ground for an initiated audience.
