When native St. Louisan Louise Anne Marler set up a studio space in St. Louis, she connected past to present, and opened herself and her work to the artistic community on Cherokee Street. She maintains other spaces in places significant to her, like Santa Monica, California, her home for many years, or Joshua Tree National Park, which serves as a prime place of inspiration. Marler also keeps a pied-à-terre in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri where her mother now resides.
“St. Louis is my beloved hometown,” says Marler. “I have a mother who just turned 80–she is fabulous–who lives in Ste. Genevieve. Now I’m close enough to spend more time with her. I can hop on the highway and be with her in a short time.”
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“I found a creative community on Cherokee Street and chose to be a part of it,” she adds. “This neighborhood is like a key in a lock that hasn’t yet turned, which makes it an exciting time to locate there.”
Marler envisions more than a studio and a living space on Cherokee. She also plans to host an old-fashioned salon, by invitation only. “My living room is arranged in a circle, for conversation,” she says. “I deliberately choose not to have a television to encourage connections, to talk with people.” Her artwork, which hangs on the walls throughout the space, serve to jump-start conversations.
Marler’s art mixes analog and digital images. “I take contemporary photographs of Mid-Century creative tools, typewriters, radios, and cameras,” she says. “Three generations of my family maintained a typewriter repair business here so I grew up with these machines and started working in the analog mode. Today, I’m a high-tech artist. I shoot with a digital camera, then layer and manipulate the images.”
Marler carries her art well past arranging pixels on a screen. She prints, then paints onto the images, adding to the layers. She’ll also sometimes incorporate words into the images, both as graphic elements and to convey a message.
“My work is like a dialogue between the analog and digital eras. It suggests interactions, conversations and ideas,” she says.
Marler’s understanding of print and graphic design shines through her images. She shares her sly sense of humor and insights into life’s ups and downs through the words she chooses for her typOwriter series, many of which are elegantly written with the use of round caps from vintage typewriters and in thoughtful, type-sensitive headlines.
To invite viewers to take a closer look at her work, Marler will sometimes hide images in the lenses of the SLR cameras that she photographs. Other times she optimizes, repeats, and colorizes graphic elements into her photos, or emphasizes a camera’s geometric shape or the lens’ focus rings. Sometimes she pays homage to long-vanished, top-notch camera models.
Marler has yet to write her story on Cherokee Street, but the curious can find her work and story at Bohème on Cherokee Street and online here.
