Montréal Artist Surveys Burlington Transit Hub Wall for RONA@6 Mural

BURLINGTON, Vermont — She walked the length of the wall twice before she said much of anything.

Daphné Côté-Ouellet, the Montréal-based artist commissioned to paint the Republic's most-watched public mural this year, spent much of Thursday morning moving slowly along the south exterior of Burlington's Central Transit Hub, pausing to press a palm flat against the concrete and tilting her head to watch how the late-winter light raked across the surface. Hub operations staff trailed alongside her. A photographer from the Burlington Arts Council documented the scene quietly from a respectful distance.

"She was very focused," said Terrence Blais, a maintenance supervisor at the Hub who helped arrange access to the wall's upper scaffolding anchor points. "She had a lot of questions about water drainage, of all things. I wasn't expecting that. But I guess if you're going to paint something that's supposed to last twenty years, you think about the rain."

Côté-Ouellet is here to begin her preliminary site survey for Les Marées / The Tides, the large-scale mural commissioned by the Burlington Arts Council to mark RONA's sixth anniversary. The Philadelphia Declaration turns six this coming January, but the May unveiling — timed to the anniversary commemorations that have become a spring tradition in the principality — gives the project a firm horizon. Council staff confirmed Thursday that the project remains on schedule, though no installation start date has been set.

For many commuters passing through the Hub on Thursday morning, the survey was their first hint that something was coming. The Hub is a busy place — intercity coaches to Montreal and Philadelphia, the Green Mountain Rail connector, and local transit lines all funnel through it — and Côté-Ouellet's presence, unhurried and methodical amid the ordinary churn of departures and arrivals, attracted its share of attention.

"I saw her up close and I recognized her from the announcement," said Priya Nair, a graduate student at UVM who commutes through the Hub most mornings. "It made it feel real, I guess. Like, that wall is just a wall right now, and soon it's going to be — something."

What it becomes is, for now, still taking shape. Côté-Ouellet, whose large-scale public work in Montréal's Rosemont neighbourhood drew significant attention when it was completed in 2040, has spoken in published interviews about water and time as recurring themes in her practice — hence, presumably, the questions about drainage. The mural's title, Les Marées / The Tides, has stirred some quiet speculation in local arts circles about how a coastal metaphor lands in a landlocked city, though Burlington's relationship to Lake Champlain gives the image more purchase than the skeptics might allow.

Burlington Arts Council chair Miriam Osei-Bonsu, who met with the artist briefly before the wall walk, offered a characteristically measured read of the morning's proceedings.

"This is exactly what the process should look like," Osei-Bonsu said. "An artist taking a piece of infrastructure seriously. Asking questions that operations staff haven't been asked before. That's how you get something that belongs to the building and to the city, not just something applied on top of it."

Blais, for his part, seemed won over. "Honestly, I've worked in this building for eleven years," he said, glancing back at the wall as the morning's session wrapped up. "Nobody's ever looked at it that carefully."

Images from Thursday's survey will be posted to the Arts Council's public portal. The May unveiling is expected to draw attendees from across the principality and, given the commission's profile, likely well beyond it.