FEATURE 005: mr BLœck's Vicarious Eye

Practitioner: mr BLœck

Location: Kemureti

Discipline: Painting / Sculpture / Photography / Video

mr BLœck came to Patronage courtesy of Max Nasmith. Within hours of joining, his profile was populated with work, and his biography read less like a bio and more like concrete poetry. Scattered type, deliberate misspellings, words drifting across white space. It set the tone for every interaction that followed.

mr BLœck is the artist pseudonym of Dean McLeod's practice. It operates as both character and behaviour, a deliberate waywardness that colours his art, his commercial photography under Black Creative, and even routine correspondence. There is an amusing bluntness to it, a dryness that keeps you slightly off-balance. No two days communicate the same way.

In 2022, whilst studying his Bachelor of Contemporary Art at Wintec, Hamilton, Dean opened Te Toi Whakaahua, a boutique contemporary gallery in Kemureti, Cambridge. The pop-up space represented local artists in a town with almost no dedicated contemporary gallery presence outside of the gallery-giftshop hybrids. For nine months Mr Black juggled his degree whilst liaising with artists, curating exhibitions and running the space, dealing largely in emerging practitioners with a focus on emerging Māori artists. Since, he has moved into working with cafes across the Waikato, building an informal exhibition infrastructure far more accessible to both artist and audience than typical galleries. He believes the main centres fail to provide enough space, and that the spaces already running are largely group-run operations making decorative art with an air of mass-produced commerciality. This is something I have also noticed, and with the dissolution of the Laree Payne Gallery in The Riverbank Lane, the situation in Hamilton and the wider Waikato has only worsened for artists.

His own multidisciplinary work is prolific, gestural and confrontational. Figures surface and dissolve, faces distorted into near-illegibility. There is a particular focus on the eye as subject, usually rendered more scrupulously than the surrounding composition. The eye as symbol of truth, consciousness, the unmediated human experience. It recurs across the portfolio with an insistence that suggests something beyond a motif. It is a question being asked repeatedly: are we seeing clearly?

Colour is applied with urgency, and whilst the handling portrays a lack of control, it is grounded in restlessness. Colour is fleeting, and much like the impressionists, much like the contemporary experience, you cannot truly capture it. Constantly moving, constantly shifting, devolving. As our society collapses into left and right, products valued for their minimalism and simplicity, there is something necessary about the expressionist register in Mr Black's work. A return to colour, to life, largely untinged by the dull black-and-white so prevalent today.

The "vicarious" series runs across at least thirteen works, suggesting a sustained investigation into modern life. Experiencing life through the lens of one's Instagram feed, their highlights. This draws back to the prominence of the eye. Are we truly seeing life through our own eyes, or through a lens, a screen? Mr Black has been a working professional since 1984, across various roles in oceanic supply chains. He has lived a life before social media. If the timeline is correct, he was born before colour television was introduced to New Zealand. That is not trivia. It means his frustration with the mediated, the filtered, the algorithmically curated is not theoretical. It is the frustration of someone who remembers the alternative. The emerging practitioners in these features bring sharp formal instincts and institutional ambition. What Mr Black brings is four decades of watching the world flatten, and the refusal to accept that flattening as neutral.

The titles of his works follow the same thread. "Cognitive dissonance" (2024). "Order & sanity" (2024). "Kaitiaki" (2025). A sustained frustration with a system that underfunds artists, undervalues regional practice, and rewards knick-knacks over conceptual risk. Knitting over confrontation. He refuses to be polite about it.

"They're fucking us and we don't seem to care" (2024) is perhaps the most direct statement in the portfolio. The work is a mixed media sculpture: a steel letterbox mounted to a wall. Inside, a manifesto. How does one percent of the population own ninety percent of the wealth? Poverty exists not because we cannot feed the poor but because we cannot satisfy the rich. Elected governments are helping them. Therefore we are helping them. The text is blunt, unpoetic, and deliberately so. It reads like something shouted at a wall.

The letterbox is the interesting formal decision. "You've got mail," the famous AOL catchphrase, one of the original interfaces between the personal and the commercial, the inbox as the first point of entry for the outside world to reach you in your own home. What was once novel is now ambient. We no longer check for mail. It arrives constantly, unbidden, selling us things we did not ask for, telling us what to care about. The letterbox is a vessel for unsolicited information, and Mr Black has filled it with the one piece of information nobody is posting: that the system is working exactly as designed. COVID made this visible. Bezos' Amazon was declared an essential service. Rat tests expired on shelves whilst people queued for hours and fought over products in supermarkets. The concept of "essential service" extended not to health, food, or shelter, but to next-day delivery, to commerce, to capitalism. Centi-billionaires were cemented in society whilst the rest of us stayed locked inside. Mr Black's letterbox captures that delivery. It arrives at your door whether you ordered it or not.

He is still bound to convention, however, through his commercial practice. Client requirements confine him to a box he cannot escape, whether in aesthetic, equipment, or the requirement to maintain a social media presence. He is forced to pursue cookie-cutter commerciality in order to sustain his artistic practice. To mentally juggle the dissonance between his experience and the briefs that pay the bills. Fighting people's perspectives and tastes. Giving people what they want when they do not know what they want.

Selected Works:

1. they're fucking us and we don't seem to care (2024)
Mixed media wall mounted steel letterbox

2. vicarious xIII (2025)
acrylic, pastel, collage on canvas