Hero’s Wreck

Superhouse is pleased to announce Hero’s Wreck, a solo exhibition by Virginia-based artist and designer Colin Knight. On view from September 5 through October 18, 2025, Hero’s Wreck explores masculinity, memory, and myth through new sculptural furniture works. The exhibition unfolds as a fragmented heroic epic—one told through sculpture, allegory, and objects that blur the lines between artifact, survival tool, and sacred reliquary. An essay by celebrated craft and design scholar Glenn Adamson accompanies the exhibition.

Hero’s Wreck reimagines myth and masculinity through the lens of war, trauma, and rebirth. Knight traces two intertwined protagonists: one inspired by the artist Joseph Beuys, famously rescued after his WWII plane crash; the other, a fictional British Spitfire pilot whose journey echoes Beuys’ in parallel. Across a series of new works—seating, lighting, and wallworks—Knight uses the visual vocabulary of mid-century design to probe how heroism is constructed, idealized, and inevitably dismantled.

Knight’s visceral materiality—salvaged leather, sheepskin, beeswax, soap—imbues each piece in the exhibition with the drama of mythic progression: call to adventure, descent, survival, reckoning, and transformation. These objects sit between sculpture and storytelling, turning familiar materials into emotionally charged vessels of memory and critique.

From the reading chair that echoes an Eames glider components wrapped in a paratrooper’s gear, to a wing-like hanging lamp crafted from rice paper and shellac, Knight’s works are imbued with the romance of 1940s material culture—while simultaneously undermining its myths. The installation is populated with ghostly remnants of heroic fantasy: leather cushions shaped like bodies, liferaft-inspired chairs, and a two-person dining table set with custom tableware and artifacts of remembrance.

The exhibition’s title refers not only to the physical wreckage of warplanes but also to the psychic wreckage borne by those who survive. It is a meditation on how trauma is housed in bodies, preserved in objects, and retold through the visual language of design.

About Colin Knight
Colin Knight is an artist whose practice investigates historical subjects—world wars, mid-20th century design, and Americana—recontextualizing them for the contemporary viewer. Knight's oeuvre spans various mediums, including furniture, reliefs, and sculpture. His self-taught skills—leatherwork, mold-making, and sewing—and the rich symbology of the materials he employs—wood, leather, soap, textiles, plaster, and upholstery—allow him to address themes such as trauma, triumph, myth, and memory. After graduating from the Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts with a Bachelor of Fine Arts, Knight's talent was recognized when he was named a 2020 Windgate-Lamar Fellow by the Center for Craft for his unique reimagining of British Mid-Century Modern design. During his 18-month fellowship, Knight explored the parallels between Blitz-era London and the COVID-19 global pandemic. Following this fellowship, Knight spent time as a furniture resident at Anderson Ranch Arts Center (Aspen, USA). Several galleries and institutions have exhibited Knight's work, including the Appalachian Center for Craft (Smithville, USA), Hesse Flatow (New York, USA), Main Projects (Richmond, USA), NCMA Winston-Salem (Winston-Salem, USA), and Superhouse (New York, USA). Learn more.