Icebox Gallery presents:
“Argentine Drag Queens”, Eduardo Blidner

The Drag Queens have created a persona, which is primarily an artistic expression. Whether some of these men would choose to undergo a sex change is a different and personal matter, but in these portraits, a collaboration between model and photographer, we are presented with a fiction. We engage, or we reject. We are not being invited to empathize or even sympathize, but instead to view and admire the artifice…

-Elizabeth Kilburn, Past Administer of the Photographer’s Gallery, London, England.

Argentine photographer Eduardo Blidner has had two other solo exhibits at Icebox Gallery. Tango Argentina, 2000 and City vs City, 2007.

Eduardo creates his fine art photographs using film and the traditional darkroom. His images are often individually toned and beautifully composed. Each image is created in the studio with emphasis on each person’s unique personality and style. Because of the discontinued manufacturing of several traditional photographic materials used to produce his images. Eduardo decided to only print one image of each of these portraits. Making each of these silver gelatin images very collectable and a one of a kind.

Eduardo’s portraits are as revealing as they are sensitive. The urban night opens up to the drag queen and Eduardo’s camera. They change their clothes and persona. Eduardo includes some revealing notes volunteered by some of his subjects. Afrodita, real name Carlos Saulnier, says - You can create another disposable self... Michelle, real name Roberto Dealoy declares - To do drag is to have power in the night.

“These men’s lives are part of the reality of Buenos Aires - a reality which emerges as if in a dream. My aim with the photographs is to acknowledge my respect for those men as they wish to be seen - as Drag Queens, by making their dream-like existence into something concrete and positive.

All my models are artists who perform in night clubs, theaters, cinema, television and in the fashion world. These photographs are collaborations between myself and the model: we feed off each other to produce the final image. The fusion of their art and my art explodes into the final photographic work.” – Eduardo Blidner

Music Added to the ICEBOX Opening:

The exhibit: Eduardo Blidner’s classic black and white portraits entitled Argentine Drag Queens opened November 7th with DJ music provided courtesy of Twin Cities music scene icon Venus DeMars. Venus is well known as the gender-bending front woman of the Minnesota glam/rock band “All the Pretty Horses.”