The irreverent Heaven Gallery in Wicker Park held an informal screening last August of work by local filmmakers, and at the last minute the curator agreed to add a five-minute digital video just completed by Kristie Drew, a graduate of the School of the Art Institute, and her boyfriend, Usama Alshaibi. The dreamlike Slaughtered Pigtails shows Drew, her hair in pigtails, running scared across a field, seen from the perspective of someone who’s chasing her with a hunting knife. Finally the predator catches up to her and violently negotiates a clear plastic produce bag over her head. A struggle transpires, and the film concludes with a close-up of Drew as a bubble of blood blooms from her mouth. The audience at Heaven Gallery had reacted positively to Alshaibi’s earlier film on the program as well as some others whose violence was muted by ironic distance. But when Slaughtered Pigtails was over, there was dead silence.
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“I discovered–or perhaps was introduced to–sexual arousal at around age five, and [I’ve] been hooked ever since,” she says. Growing up in a suburb of Kansas City, Kansas, Drew was molested by a male family member for eight years. In most other respects her childhood was normal; her parents ran an electronics repair shop and a video production company, and as a girl she’d spend her afternoons trying to construct gadgets out of spare parts. During the summer she and her younger brother would stay up until sunrise watching their parents shoot music videos, and then the family would head out for breakfast at a diner. But even as a preteen, Drew was a little kinky: sometimes she’d loiter in front of the shop, flashing her panties at men in passing vehicles and keeping a journal of how many honks she got.
A wife at 19, a mother at 20, and a divorcee at 21, Drew freely admits that her history of sexual abuse shaped her personality and her art. “That does not change the fact that I am a grown woman who is able to understand this, and still make self-directed choices,” she says. “I don’t need to claim victimhood as some sort of badge, or worse yet, an excuse for my beliefs or actions. I’m fortunate enough to be really comfortable with whom I am, regardless of the past.”
After that Drew was reluctant to meet with clients in hotel rooms, so she quit and went solo as a full-service escort. Last August she stopped having intercourse with her clients; she says her boyfriend satisfied all her cravings, and she didn’t want to expose him to sexually transmitted diseases. She still gives erotic massages and services foot fetishists, but she also teaches digital video editing at Mac University and volunteers at the Chicago Historical Society. She hopes the revenue from Objectifyme.com will allow her to quit the business altogether. Paying members can watch Drew copulating, urinating, defecating, masturbating with a lavender stuffed rabbit that’s equipped with a huge phallus, and penetrating herself with the Visifuck, a contraption she made out of a large glass tube and a flexible dildo. Various found footage available on the site includes humorous old smut films and a home movie of a woman having sex with a dog.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photos/Usama Alshaibi, Fred Burkhart.
