Distinctive photography on display at Las Vegas Art Museum

Wednesday, Jan. 17, 2001 | 9 a.m.

It was the recent opening reception for Michael Stillman Clark's photography exhibit "Heart & Soul," and hundreds of people filed into the Las Vegas Art Museum. The man of the hour was standing amid the crowd, panning the room through his video camera. Blazing on the walls are his abstract photographs, a menagerie of fluid shapes and energetic colors.

Complete with a disc jockey, a ballroom dance performance and a free raffle, it was one of the largest turnouts for an opening at the museum.

"This is an unusually vibrant opening," James Mann, curator for the Las Vegas Art Museum, said. "I think we may have crossed a threshold."

The showy reception was reflective of Clark's photographs, which feature a rich and explosive blend of swirled and streaming purples, greens, reds and blues. Objects look like molten metals, stretched glass and liquified plastics.

"My work energizes the human spirit," Clark said.

"Norma Jean," a photograph hanging at the end of the room, resembles an orange flame shaped like a womans body on a deep red-and- black background. The photograph is named for Marilyn Monroe.

"I dont know any other photography like this, on this scale," Mann said. "He's painting with light, in a way, through photography. Its extraordinary work."

A filmmaker and photographer, Clark said he began working on his abstract photographs 27 years ago in Los Angeles when he was on a promotional shoot for a company that manufactured toys. When the shoot was over, Clark said, he was left with an elaborate light system and huge pieces of black velvet.

He painted plastic toys, then photographed them while experimenting with shutter speeds and color gels (used in lighting).

"I was doing four-second openings, things a photographer doesn't normally do," Clark said referring to the shutter-speed. "(My wife) looked at the first special effects and said, 'You've got something here.'

"It started everything," he said.

From fabric to spheres, his abstracts include nearly 100 different types of materials shot while moving the camera to create the special effects.

Clark said that 99 percent of the time he doesn't know what the outcome of the photograph is going to be. "It's intentional accidentally," he said. "It's all subconscious."

Las Vegas-born Clark's mother was a waitress at the Flamingo, and his father was a pit boss there. When Clark was 6 his dad built a dark room and taught the boy about photography.

"I started taking pictures of girls making mud pies and playing with potato bugs," Clark said.

At age 12 Clark won a prize in a camera contest for a photo he had taken while on vacation in San Francisco, of someone engulfed in the ocean's surf. Five years later, at 17, he moved to the city by the bay to study acting -- but, he said, spent more time photographing other actors than acting.

Shortly after, he moved to Los Angeles where he spent the next 25 years working independently in film and photography. He considers his first film, "Sex in the Cinema," a series of stills from the first Hollywood kiss to sex on the screen in the 1970s, his greatest and says it was aired on cable television.

His 250 pieces on display at the Las Vegas Art Museum through February include photographs he's taken from 1969 to the week prior to the exhibit's opening. They range from portraits from his filmmaking days in Hollywood, to photographs capturing the arrival and departure of Las Vegas' facades and marquees.

At 58 Clark is still making videos, mostly promotional pieces for corporations, and is in the planning stages of creating a short fictional film, which will be set in Las Vegas.

He's done building sets for abstract photographs, similar to those featured in the "Heart & Soul" exhibit, and has made the transition into digital photography.

"I'm kicking, stumbling, crying," Clark said, "but I'm there."