about me

My name is Ashley Stokols. First Los Angeles, now Chicago, next: who knows?
(That was the part where I tell you where I was born and where I am currently based)



Current interests include
painting
being a student at SAIC (2025)



This is not my artist’s statement, this is my about me page:
There was a point in time–which is very recent in the span of human existence–where I made a decision which tore open a hole in space and time; the me that is writing this moves forward in this timeline, but there is another me which never made the decision at all and she exists in the good timeline and she is the good me. I am in the bad timeline which is the only timeline that I have access to, but I know that the other me is there–behind a barrier which I cannot cross. If I can’t see the good timeline, does it exist at all? If I can think the good timeline, then have I created it? These are questions that aren’t worth asking, so I won’t ask them anymore. I am splitting myself into two over and over again until the pieces of me left are infinitesimal: just two eyes, just one particle. I will then make my own mate out of my own rib and I will claw my way into the other timeline and then I’ll be happy.

From this, I have created a delicate and solipsistic creative ecosystem of introspection and self-duplication to the point of malfunction. We’ll call it what it is–it’s autocannibalistic self-obsession and a paper-thin justification for maladaptive daydreaming at its worst–and at its best, it’s a decent painting sometimes. I am a proud and unabashed ouroboros.