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Lift Modular Kettlebells Stack Up to the Competition

Lift Modular Kettlebells Stack Up to the Competition

Diametric forces can come into play when deciding what sort of exercise equipment to welcome into the home. Gym equipment – large, awkwardly sized, and industrial – is rarely a net positive aesthetically. One versatile piece of strength and mobility equipment nearly anyone can add without sacrificing space or introducing an eyesore is the kettlebell, a weight attached to a handle designed for swinging, pressing, and other momentum-assisted movements. But just like any exercise program with a progressive range of improvements, one weight is almost never enough. That dilemma is addressed by the stylish and practical Lift stackable weights by designers Erika Avery and Stu Cole.

Adjustable weights are commonplace in the market now, most notably in the form of dumbbells sold by the likes of NÜOBELL, NordicTrack, and the granddaddy of them all, Powerblock (the brand used in my own garage gym). Brands like the aforementioned have expanded out into the realm of offering adjustable kettlebells. But while functional, nobody would describe their form as elegant, nor something ideally left out in the living room.

Lift stackable weight kettlebell disassembled and laid out flat showing all 9 pieces that make up the design.

With the Lift, the designers have reached a laudable compromise between designing a legitimate piece of strength training equipment and finding a pleasing form. Comprising just nine separate parts, Lift uses a set of four solid cast iron stackable plate weights, allowing users to incrementally add or decrease loads from 11lbs to 44lbs.

Early pencil sketches and explorative designs of the Lift stackable weight kettlebell concept.

Lift stackable weight kettlebell in black set on a concrete floor.

If you’re not yet acquainted with the kettlebell, you might find its origin a fascinating detour in the history of sports equipment design. “[The] Kettlebell as we know it today, originated approximately 350 years ago… They were originally used as handled counterweights to weigh out dry goods on market scales.”

The load and handle is secured into place using a twist lock motion, making it simple to switch loads according to movement, whether practicing kettlebell swings, goblet squats, or other movements optimized for the handled design.

Detail of Lift stackable weight kettlebell disassembled from above. showing two of its weight plates removed.

As anyone who lifts knows, weights can be loud during loading and unloading, and destructive if not properly handled. Lift’s cast iron core is thus covered with a durable 5mm robust rubber finish to keep the plates from clanging as they are stacked, while also protecting floors when setting them down.

Angled top view of Lift stackable weight kettlebell in black with orange lock mechanism details.

The rubber finish is also a protective measure against the corrosion that can occur across a piece of metal caused by environmental humidity (not to mention any sweat introduced during challenging workouts).

Overhead top view of Lift stackable weight kettlebell in black with orange lock mechanism details.

Lift is currently only an exploratory concept, but the design seems more than ready for a manufacturer to adopt for consumer production, also noting the growing legions of home fitness practitioners already using Apple Fitness, the Peloton app, and other workout programs designed to introduce the kettlebell into the weekly routine.

Gregory Han is a Senior Editor at Design Milk. A Los Angeles native with a profound love and curiosity for design, hiking, tide pools, and road trips, a selection of his adventures and musings can be found at gregoryhan.com.

Plandid App Allows You to Instantly Book a Photographer in New York

Plandid App Allows You to Instantly Book a Photographer in New York

Plandid app

An iOS app called Plandid allows people to book photographers in New York City for any occasion.

Launched within the last 12 months, Plandid allows photographers to sign up so users can hire them for their services if and when they require them.

Customers can make “instant bookings” or schedule a photo shoot for any occasion, whether it be a birthday, a party, or a portrait shot for a dating profile.

“Plandid is your personal photography connection on iOS,” the company writes on its website. “Perfect for the creatives and trendsetters of NYC. Whether you’re a model building your portfolio, a fashion student showcasing a new collection, an entrepreneur launching a product, or an influencer creating standout content, Plandid has you covered.”

The app offers users a chance to explore different categories of photographers where they can favorite the ones they like the most. Then the booking takes place on the app where they can chat with the photographers and the finalized image can be downloaded on the app too.

Any Kind of Shooter

Interestingly, any kind of photographer can sign up — and yes, that includes iPhone shooters. But digital cameras, film cameras, and drones are all welcome too.

“Whether you’re a professional with a pro camera or simply know how to capture quality iPhone content, we’d love to have you join us,” adds Plandid.

Photographers are able to set their own rates and can block out times on the calendar they are not available.

The team behind Plandid says the app came about after they were searching for a car photographer in the summer of 2022 and realized “how hard it is to find a specialized photographer.”

“We still have to rely on recommendations and unsatisfactory Google search results. The idea of being able to find creative photographers who truly know how to capture your vision began to snowball.”

To find out more, head to the Plandid website or Instagram page. The app can be downloaded on the App Store.

Lodi photographer unleashes 3rd Annual Pooch Playoffs

Lodi photographer unleashes 3rd Annual Pooch Playoffs

Sheri Birchler, owner of Sheri Birchler Photography, LLC, has always loved pets. So, when the opportunity to help Jane’s Journey Home for Dogs presented itself, she jumped on it.

“These past few years have been especially hard for charities. So, a group of photographers and I got together and decided to host a competition to find South Central Wisconsin’s Ulti-Mutt Cutie as a way to help out the dogs at Jane’s Journey Home for Dogs.” Birchler said.

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Cuteness is more than a commodity aesthetic

Cuteness is more than a commodity aesthetic

‘Cute’s potential to change our way of being could be more radical than we might ever have imagined’: Somerset House’s new exhibition, Cute, explores the potent and intoxicating power of cuteness

24January 2024

“Cute is all over the internet and social media – in the way we use emojis, filters or TikTok tutorials on how to do cute crying make-up – but it is increasingly taking over the real world,” says Claire Catterall, senior curator of Somerset House’s landmark exhibition Cute (opening January 25 and running until mid-April, 2024). As the title suggests, the exhibition is a contemporary account of the world’s embrace of cute culture and how it has become such an influential measure of our times. Bringing together contemporary artworks alongside several new commissions, the exhibition includes names such as Aya Takano, Mike Kelley, Karen Kilimnik, Nayland Blake and Hannah Diamond, who, through their artwork, will seek to uncover the abiding emotive charge of cuteness, revealing its extraordinary and complex power.

Presented in partnership with Sanrio – expeditors of kawaii – the exhibition will also celebrate the 50th anniversary of one of cute’s most iconic and ubiquitous figures, Hello Kitty. “The work shows how cute’s potential to change our way of being could be more radical than we might ever have imagined,” she explains. “This feels like a distinctly 21st-century phenomenon.”

As the exhibition illustrates, it would be wrong to perceive cute as one-dimensional. “Cute has a little bit of the Trojan Horse about it – it thrives within the neoliberal capitalist structures that spawned it, while at the same time undermining its very foundations with its ability to not only challenge the norm but to transform it.” Despite becoming one of the most dominant aesthetics, the disarming nature of cute allows for reinvention. Catterall continues, “It says we can be anything and everything we want to be but its playful ambiguity also helps us to navigate an increasingly overwhelming and complicated ‘now’, providing a way to live [fearlessly] in uncertain times.”

All the artwork featured comprises a range of styles and techniques that cover the vast nuances of cute, from Diamond’s sonic, hyper-pink music installation to Monstrous Other’s robotic pets and Janpanse Gothic Lolita’s subcultural fashion. The artists and musicians featured in the show use cute as a key register to explore a range of issues, including desire and longing, memory and space, ecology and capitalism, difference and belonging. “How they mine cuteness to pose questions and express their truths is a testament to cute’s chimeric ability to reflect a multitude of emotional and experiential registers,” Catterall tells Dazed. “Its porousness adds to the gravitas of the work, rather than diluting it.”

Artist Juliana Huxtable’s elegant portrayals of selfhood with lizard eyes and pig snouts examine ideas of identity and hybridity. Neither human nor animal, these creatures reflect Huxtable’s fascination with the trans-humanist element of much online sexual subculture in their anarchic representation of ways of being. (A Black transgender woman who was born intersex, Huxtable describes her self-objectification as ‘kewt’).

While Sean-Kierre Lyons’ gargoyle is a creature in the tradition of fantastical stone grotesques protecting the buildings, they preside against evil spirits. Drawing inspiration from cartoon animation of the 1990s, Lyons’s work points to its historical roots in minstrelsy and its descent from racial caricature. Like a double-edged sword, the grotesque and the cute are pulled to extremes. Counterbalanced by the other, they appear as a mirror. Catterall says, “This sculpture is one of nine ‘protector gods’ she has been developing to build a new world order. In creating gods in their image, Lyons allows them to be autonomous and complex beings, both violent and menacing, but oh so adorably cute.”

2024 marks Hello Kitty’s 50th anniversary. Celebrated in the exhibition, the iconic anthropomorphic cat’s long history encompasses everything that cuteness is and can be. Often taken up in a subversive or ironic way, what’s remained interesting about Hello Kitty is how cool she is. “This mainly dates back to the 90s to the Harajuku kids in Tokyo rebelling against the restrictions of their societal norms, and using Hello Kitty as an ally in their rebellion,” Catterall tells Dazed. ”But also in the West she was taken up by feminists, for example, the Riot Grrrl movement, who would often wear Hello Kitty hair clips or handbags in an ironic riposte to outdated notions of femininity.”

And what are the curator’s hopes for the show? “If most people come to the exhibition thinking that cute is simply a commodity aesthetic, albeit an adorable one, then at the very least I hope we will have shown that it is so much more than that,” she says. “I would really love it if visitors came away with an understanding of cute’s potential to help us navigate towards a kinder, more nuanced, mutable world, recognising perhaps that it may even point towards a new way of being.”

Cute runs at Somerset House from January 25 until April 14, 2024.

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Geography and photography mix in new art exhibit at LSC-Kingwood

Geography and photography mix in new art exhibit at LSC-Kingwood
StrataVarious exhibit at LSC-Kingwood art gallery

Lone Star College-Kingwood presents selected works from ‘America’s Western Landscape,’ a body of iconic images of the American West, now on display at the LSC Art Gallery.

The photographer, Mark Burns, is a master of the black and white image, and is skilled in large format photography, traditional silver gelatin, platinum printmaking, and contemporary digital tools. Burns began working professionally in 1978 as a sports and commercial photographer. His photographs have appeared in publications including Time Magazine, The Sporting News, Wine Enthusiast, The Wine Spectator, and Wine & Spirits.

In 2015, Burns completed a major 5-year project, in collaboration with America’s National Park Foundation, photographing all 59 of America’s national parks in black and white. Some of the images on display at Lone Star College are from this project.

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imageMark Burns, Shiprock – Study #1, 2019, Photograph, archival pigment
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Mark Burns, Shiprock – Study #1, 2019, Photograph, archival pigment

His work has shown at the George W. Bush Presidential Library and Memorial, the Houston Museum of Natural History, the Pearl Fincher Museum of Fine Arts, and the Sam Houston Memorial Museum.

Also currently on view is Strata Various, a collaborative exhibitproduced by LSC-Kingwood geology and fine art students, and the gallery.

“Our goal is to showcase our relationship with Earth with the aim of addressing the need for its preservation and appreciation,” Art Professor Mari Omori shared. Art students will be displaying landscapes from different campus locations.

Geology Professor Cherith Letargo says the project came about after a trip to the Hill Country in the fall of 2023. “Students and faculty were in awe as they got a glimpse of the scale of Earth’s wonders – from fossils, minerals, and rocks in the classroom to the grand views of outcropping rocks in Austin, Pedernales Falls, and Enchanted Rock State Park. As we continue to discuss challenges faced by our planet in the classroom, students have asked, what can we do to bring awareness and appreciation of the beauty and resources that Earth provides us?”

Mark Burns will speak on his “American’s Western Landscape” exhibit on Feb. 7, at 12:30 p.m., in the gallery.

Professor Letargo and Professor Omori will speak on the Strata Various exhibit on Feb. 13, at 12:30 p.m., also in the gallery.

Both exhibits will be on display through Feb. 20.

The art gallery at Lone Star College–Kingwood is in the Administration and Performing Arts building, APA114. Hours are Monday through Thursday, 11:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. For more information, contact Kristine Larson at Kristine.Larson@LoneStar.edu. Or visit https://www.lonestar.edu/arts-kingwood.

Lone Star College enrolls over 80,000 students each semester providing high-quality, low-cost academic transfer and career training education. LSC is training tomorrow’s workforce today and redefining the community college experience to support student success. Mario K. Castillo, J.D. serves as Chancellor of LSC, the largest institution of higher education in the Houston area. LSC has been named a 2023 Great Colleges to Work For® institution by the Chronicle of Higher Education and recognized by Fortune Magazine and Great Place To Work® as one of this year’s Best Workplaces in Texas™. LSC consists of eight colleges, seven centers, eight Workforce Centers of Excellence and Lone Star Corporate College. To learn more, visit Lonestar.edu.

Protesters in bed during an eight-week sit-in: John Walmsley’s best photograph

Protesters in bed during an eight-week sit-in: John Walmsley’s best photograph

Guildford School of Art had a good reputation for photojournalism, but when I got there, I found there were no photojournalists on the staff. You just had to get on with it yourself. During my final year, I photographed the 1968 anti-Vietnam war demo outside the US Embassy in London. I learned on the job.

There was a lot of dissatisfaction, so when I found out there was going to be a meeting of students to discuss asking to improve things, I went along. It soon became clear that not only did the students believe the place needed a shakeup, many of the staff felt the same way. However, the governors refused to take us seriously. In those days, these places were run by local councillors who had no feeling for the young or for the arts. When we suggested they were the wrong people to be running it, we were just informed: “Do what you’re told, we’re in charge.” It was clear we needed to make a stand, and that’s how the sit-in began.

You can see the attitude we were up against in another one of the photographs I took, where the Vice-Principal is addressing students who have taken over the canteen. His stance and jabbing finger speak volumes. By week four, in an attempt to get the governors to take us seriously, we’d occupied the whole building. The sit-in continued for eight weeks, even longer than the similar protest at Hornsey College of Art in London. By the end, the school was entirely shut down, the electricity had been cut off and the board of governors were unsuccessfully applying for an order from the High Court to have us evicted.

Throughout it all, I kept taking pictures. Students were often up talking all night and sleeping wherever they could. I discovered these two in the graphic design studio one morning, asleep in their camp beds. In those days you valued your 36 frames, and I think this is the only shot I took of them. I didn’t know who they were and still don’t. A lot of us are still in touch, though, and even had a big get-together and an exhibition 50 years after the sit-in.

Two or three months before our final assessment, we’d had to say what was going to be our major piece of work. Mine was pretty mundane. When the sit-in started, I thought: “This is a ton more interesting.” It was a national event which I was in the middle of. The art school was supposed to have trained me to be entrepreneurial, to see an opportunity and grab it. “Well,” I thought. “That’s exactly what I’ve done.”

So I submitted pictures of the sit-in, half knowing the school wouldn’t be happy. And I was right: they refused to give me any kind of qualification, which didn’t please my dad I must say. But the following year, photos I had taken of Summerhill, teacher AS Neill’s democratic school in Suffolk, were published as a Penguin Education Special with a text by children’s writer Leila Berg. I gave my dad a copy and he took it to show his mates in the pub, proud as punch.

As a boy from a council estate, the art school environment was a shock at first and the sit-in was eye-opening. It ended without the governors ever agreeing to a useful dialogue with us, but soon afterwards the minister for education insisted that all schools, colleges and universities must invite students and staff on to their advisory boards. That we have that today is a direct result of those art school sit-ins.

Nowadays I do a lot of work around copyright infringement, trying to ensure photographers get paid for unauthorised use of their work. I learned back then that if something isn’t as it should be, then say so – and I’m still doing that at 76. You might make yourself unpopular, but you can look back and think: “Well, that was worth doing.”

John Walmsley’s CV

Born: Harrow, Middlesex, 1947
Trained: “Three years at Guildford School of Art (1965-68), denied any qualification”
Influences: “The early documentary photographers who could capture those life moments as they were without seeming to influence them.”
High point: “Most recently, taking a GCSE photography student into the print room at the National Portrait Gallery to see the pictures of mine in the collection. Afterwards, curator Clare Freestone very kindly gave us a personal tour of the Yevonde exhibition
Low point: “Realising that so many publishers would now rather copy or use someone’s photos without asking or paying. How a young photographer is supposed to make a living is beyond me. Trying to find a budget to get my archive digitised is also proving a major headache.”
Top tip: “Ask questions, talk to people and listen to what they say”

See the spectacular winning images from the Travel Photographer of the Year contest

See the spectacular winning images from the Travel Photographer of the Year contest