Stephanie Creaghan: The Crumbs of Our Time

Stephanie E. Creaghan – That Guy, installation view. Courtesy the artist and d.d.d.d. Photo by Nicholas Gerson.

By PHIL ZHENG CAI November 14th, 2025 

A French cruller is a fascinating site of geometry. Its base shape consists of a loop that comes in a full circle. What sets these exotic pastries apart from their American counterpart—the donut—is their extra ridges of curliness, evenly distributed across the rings. These “double curls” are relentless efforts to further fold an already rounded surface. All these efforts increase the curliness, but the base logic of construction isn't changed: a fully stable ring, like a donut, can’t be turned into a Möbius strip. Launching from the topological qualities of a French cruller, which represents Time with its looping, and how Events mark Time with ridges, artist Stephanie E. Creaghan’s solo show “That Guy” at D.D.D.D. tells a fable. It shows how we play the never-ending game of finding good taste in bad times.

The exhibition presents only one body of work. The artist engaged in a 23-day photo-performance, speaking to a void seated across from them over a Tim Horton coffee (the cup being a replica) and a French cruller (real and edible). Exactly two photos were taken each day. One photo shows the artist seated on the left and the other on the right. D.D.D.D. gallery’s subconscious-evoking space is buried two levels below street level. In this space, the 46 photos are divided into two consecutive sets of 23, with each set occupying one side of the gallery.

Stephanie E. Creaghan – That Guy, installation view. 

What impressed me the most was the seemingly unintentional installation of the photos: in two separate rolls, horizontally at eye level. Reminiscent of our relationship with Time, cohabiting but not violating, compromising but not overwriting, Creaghan’s 46 photos in two groups of 23 provide a script to pace through time in a steady one-two pace. The script itself wasn’t spelled out, but the awareness it promotes is exemplified by how the photos are displayed on the wall in one simple motion - tightly following the way the walls were constructed.

​Benjamin Buchloh poignantly theorized the dilemma that Sol Lewitt targeted with his proto-Conceptual work of the early 1960s as the conflict between structural specificity and random organization. In Lewitt’s case, he made “blueprints” which dictate how his wall pieces are to be made. In other words, we ought to interpret these “blueprints” as Lewitt’s real artworks, whereas all the final presentations on museum walls are merely executions and worldly duplications of his originals. This very process exemplifies how the artist’s will dominate a site: turning it into a provider, a subordinate. In Creaghan’s installation, they treat the site as a condition of living. The walls and columns, ups and downs, dumps and slumps, are not providers for creation. Rather, they are undeniable conditions to live with and live through. 

Stephanie E. Creaghan – That Guy, installation view.
 

If Lewitt’s blueprints assert control, Creaghan’s installation instead accepts constraint. If we were to envision the two rolls of photos installed in a vacuum, they could, in theory, be assembled in two perfectly straight lines with the imagery mirroring one another. However, when Creaghan’s blueprint of Time is activated in the gallery, the nature of the site renders the “perfect” setup impossible. In the real world that is shared by both our bodies and our artworks, there is no “perfect” setup. Reality requires us to start at certain points, go around, leap over, trace back, and abruptly end. This is exactly what Creaghan’s photo installations do. The best available setup is indeed the perfect setup, and how we taste the texture of Time is precisely by adhering to the very conditions served to us.​ 

Stephanie E. Creaghan – That Guy, installation view. Courtesy the artist and d.d.d.d. Photo by Nicholas Gerson.  

The entire project culminates in a video (just under 5 minutes in length) reenacting the scene performed on each of the 23 days: The artist, being the main and only character, makes a series of seemingly unrelated comments such as “We are categorically locked out.” “Lemme ask you a politically sensitive question: have you fucked my ex-wife?” “You are a pretty good politician when it comes to manipulating the city, so it should be duck soup for you.” Black screens were inserted between these short episodes of questioning. At the beginning and end of the video, two shots of longer durations aiming at the entire physical setup without the artist’s presence bookend the other activities. Intriguingly, the presence of light shifted ever so slightly in both these cuts to indicate the passage of time.

​Even though obscurity in meaning is deliberately enacted throughout both the performance and the documentation processes, one can clearly see Creaghan’s references via the few signifiers that they carefully selected to reveal to the public. The metal case hosting the video player was precisely constructed to have a diamond-shaped opening, which references Jacques Lacan’s Schema of Alienation and Separation. Curiously, what are traditionally marked on the vertical axis of the diamond-shaped diagram, Separation-Alienation, are now carefully engraved on the far left and right. In Lacanian psychoanalysis, Separation-Alienation describes the relationship between the subject (barred S) and its residual desire (object petit a), which traditionally lines up horizontally. By aligning themself and their missing self with Separation-Alienation, Creaghan wittily proposes that the very presence of a character doesn’t always equate the emergence of a “self,” but it could symbolize a behavior, a habit, a trend, or simply a durational intention.
 

Stephanie E. Creaghan – That Guy, installation view. 

​The exhibition also re-stages Creaghan’s physical performance site, recreating a table and two chairs in the gallery. The difference is that the artist is nowhere to be found on either chair, and that the French cruller had been finished, leaving behind a few crumbs on the plate. One might continue to interpret the installation using Lacan’s theory: it is possibly Creaghan’s own castration complex: the consumption of a symbolic item of desire leading to the Subject’s surrender. Psychoanalysis or not, the very presence of the crumbs left behind is proof that incredible events had occurred here.

At a time when the American art world remains preoccupied with art that mobilizes socially and politically at face value, “That Guy” at D.D.D.D. is a wakeup call. An alternative worldview could be equally powerful even if it sometimes conforms. Instead of going out and yelling “seize your moment,” Creaghan quietly makes a statement as they munch away—because the most powerful critique on the status quo might have been how you decide to spend time with it and leave behind some crumbs. WM