Elijah Yudt Arts Fest

The Central Pennsylvania Festival of the Arts is a renowned art festival that has been taking place

every july for more than the past fifty years; all right here in State College. The arts fest attracts

talented artists from all around the country with people coming from along the east and west coasts,

I even spoke to a couple internationally traveling artists. One artist specifically whose pieces caught

my eye was a man named Dan Baxter. Dan is an avid antiquer with a very large collection of

miscellaneous old tins, scrap pieces, and electronic components. Such a large collection that not

even his garage is able to fit all of his vintage items. The artist then takes apart the antiques and is

able to use the scraps to assemble semi functional robot-like sculptures out of them. He goes on to

explain that in the beginning of the building process he has a vision of a final piece but he does not

let it strictly define what the end product will look like. Insead he lets the initial vision unfold and

transform as he puts the pieces together. His creative process is what allows each creation to be

fully unique and intricately detailed. When he first began to make these robots, or “baxterbots” as he

refers to them, there was a decent amount of trial and error involved with fastening the pieces

together. He tried soldering them, but that turned out to be too weak to keep them locked in place.

He tried rivets, but there are still a lot of pieces that riveting is not able to connect. He found that

cold fastening is the most effective method of sticking the pieces to each other. Cold fastening is a

technique that involves using mechanical force to fuse the soft metals together. When Dan is

working he is able to completely immerse himself in his art and get lost out from everything going on

in the world around him. He loves working with his hands and creating things. My personal favorite

of the sculptures he made was a golfing robot sitting in a golf cart. The golf cart was made out of an

old Tonka dump truck, and he used the metal from the rear “dumping part” as the roof of the cart.

The robot itself had springs for both the arms and legs. It even came with miniature golf clubs as

well.