Tyra Novic Wahman and Jeanne Kosfeld

I see an innocent child here in this war zone. Blonde hair tangled on his forehead, cheeks smacked with snack food, he can’t read the panic on my face, or do I choose to put it there?

It’s too bright and early in the evening for the kind of danger I am in. I am not important enough to warrant even this kind of attention.

In the street-level parking lot on this bright, early evening I hear words often spoken in television land—“I wouldn’t do that, if I were you,” he says as I reach for my car door and—suddenly—where is everyone on this bright, early evening?

Listen mixed media, 67 x 28"

“Don’t turn around, I have a gun.”
We have, he and I both, watched too much TV.

I lie naked on an ice-cold-in-July concrete slab. I am raped twice, and can’t hear the shattering of my psyche as power, safety, strength, dignity, and security are pulled from between my legs.

I hear his threats to kill my family if I report this. I hear his instructions. I shrink and obey. My muscles shriek to attention as he points the gun at me, still, and tells me to walk away. I march, stupidly, back to the same parking lot. I give way to shock as I drive home. I fly past family sitting calmly in the living room, though their faces are eerily focused on me, then turn around and scream the truth into those faces, which shatter on impact.

Doctors comb pubic hairs and search for evidence, police draw pictures, I answer questions like the little girl that is left after a woman’s façade has cracked and crumbled away.

My mother, who tells me my own fear brought on the rape, sweeps tinkling shreds of hope under a rug.

A friend asks me what I was wearing, leaves a puncture wound.

My father, who won’t let me hold his arm in our dark alley, slices through the hard material.

But a victim / witness employee climbs over medical personnel to hold my hand. She is duct tape. A therapist, joined to me in this knowledge, holds me, lets me punch her pillow—she is superglue. The police officers who don’t look at me THAT way are Elmer’s.

A natural process of crystallization takes place over time when glass molecules beg to be joined again. The glass is not tinted, another puncture wound would dissolve all these bonds, and fissures can’t completely heal, but fear slamming the door no longer threatens its very existence.
--Tyra Novic Wahman

We are two people working together on this project—Jeanne Kosfeld, professional artist and Tyra Novic Wahman, professional writer.

The project describes a stranger rape experience I had 20+ years ago—I was recently able to write a piece, titled Listen.

Though I have started writing projects about the experience previously, it has taken me years to get to the point where I can submerge myself into a project about the rape as otherwise it would be too painful to do so.

Approximately one year ago, I began to imagine my words somehow affixed to a piece of broken glass—the break in the glass symbolizing the crash that occurred in my life at the time of the rape.
--Tyra Novic Wahman

The metaphor of a window has been used for centuries in art making. In this piece the idea of a shattered innocence within a solid, common structure is especially powerful.

The strength of the words speak for themselves, but painted on the glass, and occasionally overflowing the wooden frame, the words are given visual potency. The font choice, as well as the size of the individual words, adds to the flow and emotion of the work.