Rumor has it the prolific, enthralling artist, Samiya Bashir’s irresistible video series, FIELD THEORIES, was borne from an impulse to create a trailer for Bashir’s award-winning poetry collection, entitled FIELD THEORIES. The poems and their audiovisual offspring span lyric, narrative, dramatic, and multimedia experience, engaging their containers while pushing against their constraints. FIELD THEORIES wends its way through quantum mechanics to chicken wings and Newports, love and a shoulder’s chill, melding blackbody theory (idealized perfect absorption, as opposed to the whitebody’s idealized reflection) with real live Black bodies. Albert Murray said, “the second law of thermodynamics ain’t nothing but the blues.” Woven through experimental lyrics is a heroic crown of sonnets that wonders about love and intent, identity and hybridity, and how we embody these interstices and for what reasons and to what ends.
