ELEVEN 0. SIX
Artist Profile of Photographer McKenzie Grant-Gordon
Sharp light bounces off everything reflective. Overwhelmed eyes squint, then ease back into the shadows. On days when the sky is this clear, the sun shines a little too hard.
Further ahead, barren trees and heavy coats reveal that it is still winter. Warm breath meets bitter cold then disappears. Vendors line both ends of the sidewalk.
Approaching The Apollo her soft tread is padded by litter, then hardened, stepping on footprints left behind by giants of Black America. Names fastened to the ground by brass plaques, anchored to the tradition of this place. Cemented deep into an invisible future. Soft too is the noise lifting off each corner. Buried in the seam of muffled conversations and screeching tires is a familiar kind of silence.
A melody steady and chaotic. Relaxing.
Like falling asleep to a thunderstorm.
The sounds of the city melt, replaced by rattling carts as she slips back down to the subway.
“roadside”, 2018.
Passed down from an uncle, photography is an inherited practice for McKenzie Grant-Gordon. Brooklyn based, Maryland born with Jamaica roots, Grant-Gordon is pensive, well-read, and a mirror of her surroundings. Under the moniker “Eleven 0.Six” she produces images that capture the motion and richness of life across the diaspora.
When describing her work McKenzie tells us her practice is grounded in “liberation and love”. This vision of love, as a process entwined with and essential to the pursuit of freedom, is most widely associated with the late bell hooks. From “Outlaw Culture” to “All About Love,” hooks’ career is filled with meditations on a love more complex than that which pop media has fed to the masses. This love is a muscle to be exercised, a place of constant work, and a remedy against the “culture of domination” that keeps the marginalized at the margins.¹ This antidote–this love in action–becomes the spiritual balm which, through care and reciprocity, has the potential to transform communities. Here, in the work of loving, hooks posits we might come to know freedom. No longer a destination one reaches or a fixed position to be achieved, freedom becomes an active process, alive through those who wield love against the burden of subjugation. hooks tells us, you are free when you love and free others by loving them.
“Here, in the work of loving, hooks posits we might come to know freedom.”
Enmeshed between love and struggle is the intangible thing at the core of Black gathering. In shared spaces, rooms of worship, community centers and grandmothers’ homes, evidence of this love is alive, scattered about in the ways we show up for each other.
At the address 1106 McKenzie’s grandmother, Audrey, built the house where she’d raise her children, then her children’s children. McKenzie describes her childhood home as a place for transient souls. A rest stop that offered shelter, warmth, and the possibility of connection. Now, many years and many more miles removed from Maryland, she carries the legacy of her home and the people who raised her into her artmaking.
“Marley Beach, Bull Bay”, 2018.
Eleven 0.Six is its own type of gathering place. Portraiture, an inherently intimate practice, is Grant-Gordon’s bread and butter. In “La Habana” the camera takes in the gaze of its subject with affection. Concrete ledge or throne? Hat or crown? She is vibrant.
McKenzie’s subjects, usually Black–always beautiful–are often found in pockets of softness or jubilation. Even with their backs to us, in “Home” and “Marley Beach, Bull Bay” we meet Black masculinity with tenderness and warmth. In Fig. 4 we see knees buckling to the earth, fingertips reaching to the heavens, gazes lifted towards somewhere hopeful. Each body in rhythm with the one next to it, synchronized in abandon. Something akin to praise echoes off the image. An ode to Harlem.
Harlem, a gathering place, a confluence of cultures, and a microcosm of the Black American experience, can also be found at the intersection of resilience and joy. An expat, Grant-Gordon is still discovering the borough. Currently an administrator at Studio Museum in Harlem–the only institution of its kind committed to platforming artists of African descent²–she is an exuberant ambassador for the incubation of Black art in her new home. Rich and vast, the history of Black arts in Harlem and New York more broadly are propelling Eleven 0. Six into new trajectories. A student of her craft and an archivist of Black art history, Grant-Gordon is absorbed in the creations of her peers and predecessors. Her references span generations and mediums (Tyler Mitchell, Ming Smith, Solange Knowles, Simone Leigh, Daveed Baptiste, Kerry James Marshall, the list goes on…). When she talks about her inspirations, she beams: “I’m just a fan.”
“La Habana”, 2020
When asked “what’s next?” McKenzie tells me the pandemic has taken its toll; “my eyesight got worse and so did my patience.” Out from under the entropy of Covid-19, Eleven 0.Six is budding into a wider practice, one that reaches for experimentation and new methods of making. The tactile experience of handling, loading, winding, and developing film is stretching further as Eleven 0.Six expands towards forms even more tangible: fiber, textiles, prints. And while the next phase of Grant-Gordon’s work is still being realized, the core tenets behind it all remain steady.
Since hooks, others have taken on the mantle of liberatory love in the pursuit of Black power. Writer, activist and co-founder of the Black Lives Matter movement Alicia Garza states it plainly; “Black love is (...) an act of resistance.”³ It's radical to be so daring. To will the universe to bow towards your kindness and healing, even as the perennial fog of state violence sits heavy and low, unflinching. “We are engaging [in love] because we are choosing to live in a world that does not yet exist, but one day will surely come.”⁴ A manifesting of sorts. In McKenzie’s work, I see some of this yearning. Perhaps it’s the nostalgia of film–the dreamy, timeless veneer that 35mm can coat over the present.
Or perhaps it's the eye of the photographer spilling out from the lens, onto the subject, ricocheting back.
¹ bell hooks, Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations (New York: Routledge, 1994), 293
² “About the Studio Museum in Harlem,” Studio Museum in Harlem, accessed January 5, 2024, https://www.studiomuseum.org/about.
³ Alicia Garza, “Black Love-Resistance and Liberation,” Race, Poverty & the Environment 20, no. 2 (2015): 21.
⁴ Ibid., 23