Breaker and Maker of Patterns: POST WOOK's Collages of Healing

By @JustinWetch

POST WOOK stands in her childhood kitchen. The walls are the same color. The layout identical. Everything looks exactly as it did except she's taller now. She's safe now.

She loses it completely.

"I was back in this place that I had felt so unsafe previously, but now I felt safe," she remembers. "It was this weird feeling of bringing myself home with me."

This is Natasha Chomko, known online as POST WOOK, returned to the house she grew up in. Her parents usually rent it to college students. It happened to be vacant for the first time in years. She took it as a sign.

But we need to rewind first.

At 21, Natasha got sober. Her parents didn't understand. They still don't. There's a simple reason she never talks to them about it at night. "I don't call my parents at night," she explains. "I've never had that privilege because they're different people at night."

Growing up, there was no emotional regulation in her household. "The loudest person typically won the argument." No boundaries. The language for boundaries didn't exist for her until after she got sober.

First pattern break.

She fell in love with collage as a kid. A friend had older sisters who cut up magazines and pasted them on their bedroom walls. Natasha thought it was the coolest thing she'd ever seen.

She started ripping things out of magazines and collaging everything in sight. Light switches. Furniture. Walls. The appeal was immediate: "Even if you cut something out poorly, you can still get your point across.”

She liked the feeling of completion. Making something and having it done gave her a sense of purpose.

Despite this creative spark, she set her sights on something "more serious." Political science degree, work on Capitol Hill,  campaigns. The trajectory of an ambitious young person with a plan.

Six months into campaign work, something was missing. "I always had a creative outlet in college," she recalls. "Six months into working on a campaign, I realized I didn't have that anymore."

Natasha felt creatively starved. So she googled "Photoshop on phone." She found an app called Photoshop Mix. It no longer exists, but it served its purpose. "I learned how to cut things out and what a blend layer was," she says. "I've still never had any formal art training. I just learned on my own." She made art on her phone for the first two and a half years.

Her following exploded. 10,000 followers by the end of 2018 after 6 months of posting. 100,000 by late 2019. Support from festival communities and the sober crowd carried her forward. She made art every single day for over 1,000 consecutive days.

Then it stopped being fun.

"I stopped doing daily art because I was making the same shit over and over," she admits. "It got so boring. People loved it, but I didn't love it anymore."

She kept a journal during this period. One entry haunts her in the best way: "I feel like a lab rat that pushed the button so many times the button fell off."

Artists get addicted to engagement. She noticed the pattern forming. "Oh, people love when I use red? I'll keep using red." She was reheating her own nachos. Iterating off herself rather than making the art she actually wanted to make.

"Good engagement isn't as valuable as real impact," she realized. She needed a break. To examine what she was doing. To stop chasing the algorithm and start chasing herself again.

Second pattern break.

Instagram opened doors she never expected. Every single brand that contacted her found her through her posts. Toyota. BMW. Adobe. Chase Bank. The rock band Greta Van Fleet.

Late 2020, she discovered NFTs. She watched her friend Josh Pierce make $500,000 in a single sale.

"I came for the money, but I stayed for the tech."

She is frank about it. As time has gone on, the easy money is gone. She could leave. “I choose to stay here because I like it.”

One of her most meaningful projects came from this space: The Astronomer's Daughter. A collection of 100 pieces created in collaboration with her father. She used astronomical data from his work as a NASA engineer. Bitcoin Ordinals became the perfect vehicle. By choosing specific satoshis tied to dates between 2009 and 2024, she built a body of work literally anchored in time and space.

Then came December 2024. Her art lit up the Las Vegas Sphere. The world's largest LED screen. Her work, towering over the Strip.

She stood anonymously among the crowds, listening to strangers react to her art. They had no idea it was hers. "People were literally talking about it in front of me not knowing it was mine," she laughs. "That was cool, for sure."

The peak. But she was already planning the descent. Not down, but inward.

"I never want to feel like I'm avoiding anything in my life."

Natasha had been avoiding her adolescence for years. Drugs. Alcohol. Robbing stores. "Total adolescent degeneracy," she admits. She had no interest in being confronted with any of that. She was good not thinking about it.

Then she reached a point where she realized avoidance itself was the problem.

She planned to spend two weeks at her parents' house. Something she had never done since high school. Completely immersed in their chaos.

Friends told her she was insane. "You know this isn't gonna go well."

But it was totally fine. Mostly. She immediately noticed dynamics she slipped back into on autopilot. Not yelling at her parents, but managing their emotions. "My mom's upset and frustrated," she recalls thinking. "I felt like I needed to go downstairs and make sure my dad knows what he's doing." Then it hit her. "Dude, I'm 30 years old. Why am I trying to manage these two adults?"

She walked through every single room. Every closet. She laid on the floor in her bedroom. She knew every little divot in the wood. Every crack in the ceiling. But now without the fear that used to accompany those memories.

She had arrived in Maryland intending to make very cinematic, editorial work. Then she got there and pivoted completely.

"I'm not doing any of that," she decided. "One, I don't feel the need to, now that I'm back here. I'm going to make this about healing."

What's interesting is showing what it feels like to revisit your past and realize no one is there. Everyone can relate to that feeling. Everyone can relate to the dynamics with their parents. Everyone can relate to feeling stuck in cycles and patterns they can't break.

The collection is 24 pieces. Twenty-four hours in a day. A visual memoir of adolescence.

She calls it the "wolf phase." That period in life during your teenage years when you realize your parents aren't always right, but you don't have the ability to work with life's cycles yet because you don't even know what they are. "Thirteen, fourteen is like the hardest time to be alive," she explains. "You don't have any power, and you know that you want it but you can't get it at that age."

One piece is titled "Diverging Truths." She set her tripod up on a bench facing down. A mirror on the ground. In one shot she's crawling over the mirror, looking into the lens. From the mirror's perspective you see her looking at the camera.

All the pieces are lenticular prints. As you move past them, the image changes. In "Diverging Truths," one angle has her there. Rotate it slightly, she disappears entirely.

"The whole idea is, when you're figuring out that your values diverge from your parents', you don't know what up from down looks like," she says. "It's very hard."

A memory is an unreliable narrator. Like a lenticular print. Never a clear-cut image.

Physically, these will be shown as large lenticular prints at SCOPE Art Fair during Miami Art Week. On social media, they'll appear as videos flipping between states. On chain, you can actually interact with them yourself. Rotate the states at your own pace. She's using Juno, a no-code tool by @TransientLabs, to make it happen.

Her process starts with photography. Often theatrical staging, thanks to years spent doing theater where she learned set design and lighting. She scouts locations at terrible times of day just to plan the composition. Then returns when the light is right to shoot for real.

"The biggest thing an artist can do is just show up imperfectly and do it," she insists. "You don't have to be perfect; you just have to get it done."

The whole point: "It's meant to kind of help people help themselves set their own adolescent self free."

Third pattern break. The biggest one.

"Do you feel yourself dying?" I asked her.

"Yes, but I want to explain," she says. "I think death in the sense of rebirth is more of what's going on."

It's been a good death. Like the Death card in Tarot. Everyone freaks out when they pull it because they don't know what it means. The Death card just means that something new is coming.

What does she want instead? "I want to be an actual artist. Like a real-life artist. I'm on social media and I'm in real life and I'm in a gallery and I'm down the street from you. Look around. Turn around. I'm right in your face."

She laughs. "I'm in your house. I just wanna be everywhere."

She looks at artists like Jen Stark and Killer Acid. They're everywhere. Murals, collaborations, galleries, Web3, retail stores, museum shows. That's the vision.

Her personal motto guides her: "Seek to comfort rather than to be comforted, to understand rather than to be understood, to love rather than to be loved."

Why this motto? "Cause I'm a selfish fucking asshole at my core," she laughs. "And I think I really benefit from helping people instead of expecting help."

Above all, she says: "I'm a story-first artist. I think telling the story is the most important part of the artwork. I'm gonna do whatever it takes to tell that story."

Natasha credits @GuyNorcal, @DeeZe, and @bearsnake_21 for being great friends and supporters in the space. For future Weekly Dose episodes, she recommends @killeracid, @Jen_Stark, and @danielkoeth.