Desert Camouflage is a series of 18 site-specific artworks incorporated into architectural screens at bus shelters along Sun Metro Brio’s Dyer rapid transit line. The line begins in downtown El Paso and terminates in the northeast part of the city, with the longest part of the corridor along Dyer Avenue, bisecting the Franklin Mountains to the west and Fort Bliss Army Base to the east. The art concept plays off the duality of these two landscape types—wild versus civilized, organic versus ordered, public versus restricted—and explores a commonality between them, the theme of “camouflage.” In the natural, mountainous landscape, animals and plants use markings and mimicry to disguise themselves from predators. In the military landscape, humans use patterns and shrouds to both mask and conceal themselves from predators.
The 18 art installations are broken into 5 types, each type portraying contextual elements through a motif of camouflage. These include: “Cavalry,” cut acrylic forms drawing on the cavalry regiment historically stationed at Fort Bliss and set into the shelter grills to depict an army formation, but which when viewed from a distance coalesce into the shapes and markings of butterflies and moths native to the region; “Nets,” inspired by netting that was woven with strips of fabric to create cover that simulated foliage, here constructed with colored polycarbonate pieces bent into U-shaped forms that fit into the aluminum shelter grills and configured to form shapes informed by historic military netting, like spirals and lines, as well as by desert animals like snakes; “Pixels,” in historic downtown El Paso, uses acrylic cubes set into shelter grills to form pixelated faces of historic figures Pancho Villa, a Mexican Revolutionary hero, and Mary Stanton, the founder of El Paso’s Public Library, in a motif inspired by fractal patterns used in present-day military uniforms; “Toile”, polycarbonate panels with imagery employing a cultural camouflage motif that combines historic and present-day park scenes from this part of El Paso, arranged in a composition that is woven together with garlands of roses; and “Dazzle,” polycarbonate panels depicting the Yucca plant through a graphic motif that was developed in World War I to disguise vehicles.
Desert Camouflage was commissioned by the City El Paso Public Art Program.