For American artist and designer Colin Knight, like many of us, fiction offers a way to escape the ordinary. Dreaming of Greek heroes and their modern-day equivalents, he finds himself inexorably drawn to sagas of the hero’s journey, tales of endurance and transformation—stories such as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), as Knight shares. It is only fitting that his solo exhibition at Superhouse, New York, is titled Hero’s Wreck, an exploration of masculinity, memory and myth through a series of sculptural furniture designs and objects. While the show’s name refers to the wreckage of warplanes, it also echoes the psychic destruction and distortion of those who survived it. Described as ‘a meditation on how trauma is housed in bodies’, the design exhibition preserves the wreckage in its presented objects through a visual and tactile approach and language. On view from September 5 – October 18, 2025, Hero’s Wreck unfolds as a scattered, fragmented epic, featuring allegorical designs that at times act as artefacts and tools of survival, and also become sacred reliquaries.

Based in Virginia, US, the furniture designer recontextualises historical themes in the realm of contemporary design through furniture, product designs and sculptures. Self-taught in leatherwork, mould-making and sewing, Knight works with materials such as wood, leather, soap, plaster and fabric to shape his pieces. “I wanted to interweave elements of a heroic epic with my passion for historical research and inclination towards mid-20th-century design. While creating work for the show, I began to place myself into the stories I was creating, as both character and storyteller,” the contemporary designer tells STIR. Through this personal approach, he confronts “romanticisation of war, a reconciliation with time past and a yearning for one’s own personal myth”, as he tells STIR.

With the lens of war, trauma and rebirth, Knight places two narrative cores as a connecting thread that guides the designs— artist Joseph Beuys’ miraculous rescue after his Second World War plane crash and a fictional British Spitfire pilot, inspired by Knight’s family history. Drawing parallels between their journeys, the artist probes how heroism is shaped, mythologised and idealised, eventually collapsing under its own contradictions.

Fascinated by worldbuilding, the artist has always been drawn to artists that create stories with their work. “Joseph Beuys, whose mythic storytelling is unrivalled in the age of post-war art, has both troubled and attracted me. Despite his legacy of often groundbreaking installation and performance, I was confused by the art world's seemingly quick forgiveness of his Nazi past. [To] help bring this questioning into my work, I wanted to recreate moments of this mythic rebirth Beuys preached, often inserting myself into the story through form and material to get closer to the core of it. Alongside Beuys’ story, I developed a fictional character, based on my own family history, of a British Spitfire pilot whose journey mirrors Beuys in a parallel path through history. This mirrored character allowed me to insert my own personal myth into the work and created moments of comparison between the two stories. While some may feel the… excitement of these intertwined epics, I hope to also convey a criticism of a romanticised view of the hero’s journey, these hyper-masculine tales confusing heroic fate with the gruesome reality of war and conflict,” Knight tells STIR.

In his accompanying essay, Blitz Kid, Glenn Adamson, American curator and author, observes that Knight “comes neither to bury nor to praise this terrible episode,” but instead offers “a meditation in which heroism is bound up with trauma, tropes of masculinity with admissions of human vulnerability.”

The show’s functional, sculptural design pieces embody this tension, as witnessed in the Show Your Wound sofa design, Survival Raft armchair, Life Chair and Pilot’s Seat. The artist also displays his artworks made from leather, dye and wax on wooden panels, including Hero, Sortie, Flak!, Voda, Dawn in the Drink, K-Type, Finale and the maple-framed Conspirators. Crafted from rice paper and shellac, a wing-like lighting design, Crash Fragment, hangs from the ceiling, illuminating the exhibition space. Besides the exhibits, the materials themselves play a vital role in forming a ‘unique lexicon,’ exploring the relationship among mid-20th-century design, war conflict and fictional symbolism.

“With the challenge of making all the work functional, I used the narratives of the crafted stories to help guide the function and design of each piece. For example, in Pilot’s Seat, I wanted to bring one of the characters’ airplane seats to life in a way that both included the viewer and embodied aesthetics and forms of mid-century design.”

Knight uses an experimental plywood seat by the Eames company as a starting point of reference, following intuition to shape the piece. Placing a seat-mounted room divider as a plane window and a swivelling reading lamp as a turret, the American designer crafts a piece that echoes Eames glider components wrapped in a paratrooper’s gear.

A small dining table set, Rebirth for Two, with a leather tabletop, bespoke tableware and nostalgic artefacts, evokes a lived environment, contributing to the experiential design of the exhibition. It features a beeswax candle cast into the form of a flashlight, symbolising Beuys’ transformation from soldier to artist, its materials known for having healing properties, while the light itself embodies Beuys’ search for the truth from his personal transformations. A hand soap cast into the shape of a British civilian bomb shelter ties to the designer’s personal myth, referencing his grandmother’s life in London during the Blitz, while the soap itself represents the desire to ‘wash away’ this traumatic experience.

Knight’s assemblages channel the romance of 1940s material culture, only to undermine its myths and beliefs by carrying themes of trauma, survival and transformation. The ghostly remnants of a personal heroic fantasy also feature leather cushions in the shape of the human body and life raft-inspired chair designs. “Thinking about the materials included in the show in the context of the 1940s, we need to remember that the war reached almost all parts of the world in terms of material rationing, the influence of wartime manufacturing on design, and an ever-growing human desire of a search for comfort in survival,” Knight tells STIR.

The exhibition’s official release states that the natural materials—salvaged leather, sheepskin, beeswax and goat milk soap—carry visceral associations. “The most common material, shared among the entirety of the work, is leather. Taking form from the shapes beneath it, requiring care as it fades in the sun, the material represents an analogy for our skin and bodies. Leather, being the salvaged skin from an animal, does not waste its inherent trauma as it is used with [the] intent to convey these powerful and often harrowing stories of war. Materials like sheepskin reference both its own functional properties for warmth, its wartime use in flight clothing, and a nod to materials of artistic myth (in this case, Beuys’ wool felt, a product made from the hair of the sheepskin). Meanwhile, materials like beeswax and soap represent transformation and a cycle of rebirth in these narratives of the show,” the designer reveals.

Knight subtly addresses themes of material rationing and war’s influence on the design industry through a cohesive material palette that gives the exhibits their distinct look and feel. But, the show is larger than its components and themes, as Adamson writes in the essay, it is about being “caught up in the churning wheels of history… even as visitors take in his subtle and sophisticated work, men and women elsewhere in the world will be dying at the hands of others.” As these layered narratives imbue the designs with meaning, Knight’s own story begins taking shape as he channels his memory and journey into crafting the pieces, building his own mythology of care and confrontation—one that reimagines the heroic not as conquest, but as endurance.