The Creative Alliance of New Orleans (CANO) announced this season’s reopening of Crevasse 22 | River House with “Invisible Rivers” featuring the “Float Lab,” a collaboration of Mondo Bizarro and The Land Memory Bank & Seed Exchange.

“Invisible Rivers” featuring the Float Lab is a series comprised of exhibitions with educational performances. It employs the artistic practices of music, theater and boat-building to respond to our region’s interconnected struggles against coastal land loss, environmental racism and displacement. Mondo Bizarro is building boats in rapidly disappearing areas of our coast and hosting dialogues and performances on them. “Invisible Rivers” physically models ideas about how we can live with fluctuation, uncertainty, and symbiosis in our increasingly watery world.

On May 2, Mondo Bizarro begins their residency at Crevasse 22 | River House with an installation that features the Float Lab. Collaborating with artist Monique Verdin and her family of indigenous Houma Nation boat builders, they designed and developed a Float Lab that will travel by land and water to various locations that will host the Invisible Rivers activities.

Float Lab is a 15’ by 8 1⁄2’ pontoon platform/boat outfitted with a display area for exhibitions and a seine net to harvest seafood. It is designed and built as a blank canvas to allow for various types of experimentation related to how we can live on water. Part field station for community engagement, part performance venue, part art exhibition space, it will provide an activation site to bring our ancestral, cultural and physical knowledge of the wild, free-flowing past into the present. The Grand Opening of “Invisible Rivers” includes art, music, local cuisine, and refreshments.

Works on view in the River House include contemporary and historic paintings, installations, carved wildfowl, photography, ceramic sculptures and a model for the Robert Tannen and Frank Gehry “ModGun,” a modular house design intended as a post disaster housing alternative to trailers. The “ModGun” can easily be expanded with additional rooms like adding cars.

Also included is an exhibition of ceramic sculptures called “Earth-Works,” with works by Susan Bergman, MaPo Kinord, Christina Larson, Kevin O’Keefe, Sandra Pulitzer, Robert Tannen and now Lucia Aquino. The carved wildfowl are by regional artists that reflect their love and commitment to the environment and the lifestyle it supports of hunting, fishing, and living in a coastal zone. Robert Smith is adding new carved wildfowl works. Other artists currently included in the River House are: John James Audubon, Walter Anderson, and Pippin Frisbee Calder.

CANO is also presenting new, large-scale sculptures in the Crevasse 22 Sculpture Garden. Current artists in the sculpture garden include: Rayne Bedsole, Luis Colmenares, Clifton Faust, Mitchell Gaudet, Gene Koss, Christopher Saucedo, and Robert Tannen. New additions in the garden include Jennifer Odem, Anastasia Pelias, Hannah Chalew, and Robin Tanner

Crevasse 22 | River House, which opened as a pop-up arts venue for Prospect.3, is now permanent and continues to present exhibitions related to the “beauty and risks of nature”, addressing the threats to this region demonstrated by Hurricane Katrina, other storms and climate change driven ocean rise that is drowning marshes throughout Louisiana’s gulf coast.

“The site is located in a classic Louisiana landscape, next to a small lake carved into Bayou Terre aux Boeufs. Families are welcome and can also enjoy the trails in the woods just behind the River House,” said Creative Alliance of New Orleans Executive Director, Jeanne Nathan.

“The Torres | Burns Trust is happy to welcome the public and is enjoying the visitors who have discovered a part of St. Bernard they didn’t know was here, including the landscape, the art, and the people,” said Sidney Torres, owner with Roberta Burns of the extensive site.

Torres and Burns have treasured the bucolic Louisiana site of the crevasse, or breach in the river that in 1922 created a small lake out of the bayou surrounded by live oaks dripping with Spanish Moss, and home to many permanent and migrating bird species. Torres and Burns, further “hope that the presentations at Crevasse 22 | River House will reinforce the cultural legacy of the Parish and help draw former and new residents and businesses to the Parish to realize its potential for rejuvenation and growth”. Sidney Torres is a descendant of Los Islenos, or Canary Islanders who migrated to the region in the 18th century, to help the Spanish prevent British colonization of the region.

For more information, visit cano-la.org.