ALREADYMADE n° 2 : Fountain (2025)
Modular sculpture/fountain, tile, wood, chrome, ice, salt, copper, silicone tubing, pump, vodka, coffee, double cream – Variable dimensions.
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)
Happening, 180 min
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.