ALREADYMADE n° 2 : Fountain (2025)

Modular sculpture/fountain, tile, wood, chrome, ice, salt, copper, silicone tubing, pump, vodka, coffee, double cream – Variable dimensions.

An art installation with a metallic lamp on the left, connected to wires, casting a circular shadow on a wooden wall. In the foreground, a white tiled cube with black grout lines supports various cans, a bowl, and tools. The background features a wood-paneled wall and a brick wall on the right.

Created during an artist residency at Centre Matéria, in collaboration with the Maison des Métiers d’Arts de Québec, ALREADYMADE No. 2: FOUNTAIN explores the hybrid space between the utilitarian and the poetic. This modular sculpture-fountain engages with themes of transformation, circulation, and the absurdity of consumption cycles.

At its core, the installation assembles everyday materials—tiles, kitchen staples, and plumbing components—into a structure that evokes both domestic rituals and industrial systems. Copper tubing spirals around a vertical column, cooling a White Canadian cocktail as it flows through the circuit. A tiled cube, functioning simultaneously as altar and machine, directly references Dialogue avec l’histoire, a work by French artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud. Originally gifted by the City of Paris to Quebec City in 1987, Raynaud’s sculpture was demolished in 2024 for safety reasons. In this work, the tiled cube becomes a reactivated, reconfigured fragment—an echo and a response to that erasure.

Liquids such as vodka, coffee, and cream—symbols of both excess and routine—circulate through the system, composing a surreal, sensory choreography of taste, labor, and entropy.

The installation invites viewers into a cyclical performance of transformation: from liquid to vapor, hot to cold, useful to futile. ALREADYMADE No. 2 is as much about process as it is about materiality—an alchemical apparatus for a daily life deconstructed and reassembled.

ALREADYMADE n° 2 : Fountain ; Making off a White Canadian 100 feet at a time. (2025)

A man in a white tank top pouring liquid from a bottle into a glass funnel on a tiled table, with a wooden wall in the background.

Happening, 180 min

A man in a white tank top and black shorts stands in an art installation, holding a drink in one hand, partially drinking from a shower head sculpture connected to a structure resembling an atom with various bottles and containers around.
Man in tank top, shorts, socks, and sandals holding a showerhead head to his face with one hand, bent over a white tiled structure, in front of a wooden wall, in a room with wood flooring.
A pyramid-shaped sculpture made of white tiles with black grout lines, resting on a wooden floor. There is an ornate, silver-colored foot at one corner of the sculpture and a plastic bag containing yellow spiral-shaped objects nearby. An electrical cord is draped over the top of the sculpture, with a wall and a wooden wall in the background.

In ALREADYMADE No. 2: FOUNTAIN ; ACT I : Making off a White Canadian 100 feet at a time, I tried to divert the legacy of Duchamp’s readymade to create a terrain for sculptural, liquid, and identity-based experimentation. The work takes the form of a modular fountain, sprawling across 100 feet, powered by none other than a fictional cocktail inspired by the White Russian: the White Canadian—a chilled, sweetened, nationalized version of a post-Soviet classic.

Born in the 1940s in the United States, the White Russian combines vodka, coffee liqueur, and cream. A playful détournement of Soviet imagery, it gained pop-cultural cult status through The Big Lebowski (1998), where it became the offbeat fetish of a Western anti-hero. Lounge cocktail, kitsch icon, symbol of cultivated apathy: the White Russian is a serious joke, a fully postmodern beverage. In this work, its Canadian counterpart becomes a cold, ironic echo: softer, whiter, frostier—a doubly creamy parody of national identity, a pop remix of an already hybrid symbol.

This choice is anything but incidental. The White Canadian becomes the fuel for a hybrid apparatus—part performative bar, part unstable monument, part ironic machine. Through this liquid activation, I wanted to explore fantasies of whiteness, cultural constructions of Canadian identity, and the ritualization of objects within the space of art.

As with any already-made endeavor, imitation, replication, and invention coexist. Humor meets critique; kitsch becomes a method. As the cocktail circulates, it performs a kind of alchemy: no longer merely a drink, it transforms into a sculptural material in motion—a metaphor for a diluted, sweetened, mixed, and pumped-up nation—100 feet at a time.