Total Immersion: Water and the Louisiana Landscape

Get one last look at Total Immersion: Water and the Louisiana Landscape before it closes February 20, 2017.

Louisiana is best understood as a dynamic meeting of land and water. Artists living and working in the region often produce work focused on water and its complicated relationship with the Louisiana landscape. Defined more by its constantly changing coastline than by any arbitrary borders, Louisiana is a marshy merger of sea and shore. In the exhibition, Total Immersion: Water and the Louisiana Landscape, artists working with water as a theme create whimsical yet haunting works that communicate volumes about the resilience and buoyancy of a life lived near or below sea level. These works communicate a story about Louisiana’s complex relationship with an element that is at once a life giving and yet unpredictable force of nature.

Rising seas and the disappearance of protective wetlands threaten Louisiana's broad, heavily populated delta, making it the most endangered coastland on the planet. This exhibition opened in March 2016, accompanying the emergence of The Water Campus, an international destination in Baton Rouge for leading scholars in science, engineering, and other specialties that will advance the study and applied science of water research for the global community. 

In this gallery, art meets science. Like the scholars who will collaborate at The Water Campus, the artists represented here examine and reflect upon the complex relationship of water and land and people around the world.