What We Hold
Roy Lee (NSW Australia)
Part of Head On Photo Festival Open Program
Safety and danger do not exist as inherently separate entities – they are boundaries produced by institutions that generate a particular social order. That order is tacitly internalised within individuals and communities, leaving behind subtle traces and phenomena embedded in everyday objects and behaviours. What We Hold proceeds from this recognition, working to bring those traces into visibility through gun culture and the materiality associated with it.
These objects and spaces exist within systems where force is measured, practiced, and contained. Yet their meaning shifts depending on who holds them – and with what intention. Each carries the same institutional logic, yet produces entirely different registers of familiarity and threat.
The places in the series bring those boundaries into direct and unresolved confrontation – spaces of casual pleasure, communal gathering, and collective experience set against the regulated architecture of force. This work attends not to the enforcement of those boundaries but to their tacit internalisation within ordinary life, unfolding across multiple segments.
Artist Biography
Roy Lee is a Sydney-based artist working across photography and installation, whose earlier work explored distance, memory, and the human condition through the vastness of the Australian rural landscape using drone and surveillance technology. His current project, What We Hold, examines the shifting meanings of force through the lens of civilian gun culture, tracing the unstable boundary between control and violence. Lee holds a Master of Arts in Photomedia from the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Arts in Sculpture from Hongik University, Seoul. He has been a finalist in several national contemporary art awards and his work has been exhibited in Australia and internationally.
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