Foxy artist is a masked crusader

Coyote, the trickster god of several Native American cultures, is an entity that makes visible what is invisible and goes against normalcy. Tony Allard fits the bill.
Transmedia maven and part-time art instructor at SWC, Allard has continuously squirmed away from the conventional. Art, a sanctuary of iconoclasts since the beginning of time, rarely generates an eccentric of Allard’s stripes.
Allard describes himself as a contrarian figure and a trickster at heart.
“Tony Allard is an artist,” said Allard about himself. “As I tell my students, ‘artists put things where they don’t belong,’ and that’s what a trickster does.”
Tricksters are commonly portrayed as foxes or coyotes. Perched up in his backyard Allard has a vibrant orange mask of a fox with holes for its eyes, waiting to give his owner inspiration.
“I just left it there for years and then one day I was going by and I looked at it,” said Allard. “I was like ‘Wow, that mask just said something to me.’ I knew exactly at that moment what I needed to do with that mask.”
In June 2004, amidst all the commotion of the Bush era, Allard said he felt the need to protest. Heckety was born. Allard’s alter ego was his way of demonstrating his disapproval of the government.
“What I was responding to was this extreme right wing pendulum,” he said.
“The Bush administration’s policies were really anti-American.”
Wearing his fox mask, a lab coat and a mailbox backpack, Allard guised as Heckety and roamed the streets of Normal Heights as his first act of protest. He appeared in “Art Around Adams,” an annual festival in Normal Heights. Allard said it was perfect irony for a trickster to live in a normal place.
“He didn’t speak and he was at street level,” said Allard. “It wasn’t like ‘In your face I have a protest sign in my hand!’ It was more subtle. I was injecting into the culture some poetry.”
Heckety may be a street performer, but for Allard it was an action with the potential to change things.
“An action, especially at street level, gets the average citizen or person engaged with me,” said Allard.
Heckety instructed people to put things in his mailbox. The fox was unaware of what items the people concealed in it. It realized his goal of revealing artistry where you least expect it.
“The mailbox is to make things disappear,” said Allard. “At the end of the night I make them once again visible.”
Allard recently introduced Heckety to his Drawing 1 class. Christopher Lizarraga, 21, a graphic design student, said it was really interesting.
“Honestly, I think it’s out there, but it’s different,” said Lizarraga.
Allard has also done work in radio, but with a twist. His fascination with fossils inspired him to start his creative company, Fossil Media, in 1992 and has since produced what he called “electromagnetic fossils.” These fossils are playable compilations of recorded as well as live audio.
“They’re moving in the direction of completely ephemeral,” said Allard. “The medium and the message are completely dematerialized.”
“World_Mix_Nagoya” is an electromagnetic fossil Allard created with his collaborative partner, the Rev. Dwight Frizzell, in 2002 while they were in Nagoya, Japan. It contains all of their WORLDmix broadcasts since 1993 mixed with random recordings including Japanese public announcements.
His latest endeavor is Sci-Fi meets Market Street. In collaboration with bioartist Adam Zaretsky, the duo attained the DNA of Beat writer William Burroughs. Allard said their goal is “patenting life forms and owning certain germ lines.”
Their possession of Burrough’s DNA was made through a rather peculiar extraction.
“Highly unconventional,” said Allard. “But not an illegal process.”
It came from what Allard called “Beat scat” extracted in June 2011 in the University of Kansas Medical Center.
“The connection that Adam and I have to Burroughs is Burroughs was creating literary cut-ups in writing,” said Allard. “We are going to create genetic cut-ups using actual DNA.”
In his classes Allard inspires students by playing songs reminiscent to techno and house music, sweet beats that are mindful of technology and relaxation.
“I think he plays it to help us in concentration to drown out background noise and stuff,” said Sarah Vianna, 19, undecided.
No matter if he is Heckety, a multifarious artist or Tony Allard himself, this trickster said his goal is to reveal what the eye cannot normally see, whether hiding an object or opening the unconscious
“He’s always at the crossroads,” said Allard of himself. “He’s never settled in. He’s always in that transitional space where transformation can happen.”