Karl Monies’ foray into stoneware manifests through a range of vessels: a series of decorative lidded containers, jars, and pots adorned externally by multi-colored climbing rope and finished with oversized cork lids. A trained painter and part-time fine jewelry designer, Monies is somewhat of a stranger to utilitarian design objects, which he approaches with the naïveté of an amateur, a humble student. His on-going Arcana series embraces design thinking only to interrogate it and undermine it from within, resulting in a line of aesthetically compelling, esoterically symbolic, and deeply humane objects that seem both ancient and hyper-contemporary, silly and sublime.