Vincere!

Colin Knight has long inhabited the ambiguous zone between comfort and catastrophe, finding there a fertile ground for his craft-driven artistic practice. His work often begins with a potent image from history or myth—a Spitfire wing, Icarus plummeting to earth—which he uses as a visual matrix for objects that straddle the domains of sculpture and design.

At COUR, Knight has distilled an extended period of material research into a new cycle of leather panels. In contrast to older works, these panels now incorporate or emulate functional elements: a headboard, a sconce, a liquor cabinet, a mirror, a coat rack. The resulting sculptural ensemble is more ambiguously domestic, but no less enthralling, than anything he’s shown this side of the Atlantic. Reliefs abound with references to a murky family mythology, and violence lurks in the softened outlines of spears and armor. Knight is a skilled excavator and retrofitter. He accumulates bits and shreds from every area of human storytelling, extracts a narrative kernel from each one, and imprints these onto porous, skin-like surfaces. This treatment of historical subjects is oddly flattening, though the outcome is never the same. Under Knight’s hand, Flemish war stories, dirt track racing, and Mussolini’s execution all occupy the same pictorial plane, are narratively levelled.

Yet the mood is never purely somber or melancholic. Vincere!, a cry of victory that could evince hubris or joy, speaks to the dubious act of sublimation involved in any reckoning with the past—namely, the hardening of collective memory into solid emotional shapes, of scars into smooth surfaces.
-Ezra Babski