Picnic for a N(n)ervous System
July 11–September 20, 2025
Opening July 10, 6–8pm
Artist Talk July 11th, 4pm
In Picnic For a N(n)ervous System, Von Coffin and Warren Neidich estrange processes of attention, sense-making and cognition. Critically engaging with emerging theories of the embodied, embedded, enacted, and extended mind, the artists use painting, neon and sculpture to activate uncommon neural pathways, modulating our world-making capacities towards the emergence of diverse neural architectures—and, correspondingly, new modes of thought and action.
Von Coffin works in sculpture, painting, and food service, examining colour and figure in new forms, both abstract and explicit. They think of it as “Neuroformalism” or “Caloric Abstraction”– something that equates the inner and invisible with canon. Small painted blocks are bits of information within sculptures, their colors carefully translated from common candies. A cozy paradox forms around this question: what does it mean for something to have a yellow color and taste that “is” lemon or banana, but not be a lemon or banana? Neuroscientist György Buzsáki proposes that “Learning is a matching process between a pre-existing pattern [in the brain] and an outside world event that happens to coincide with the presence of that pattern.” Maybe this color translation is like a neural massage, creating parallel patterns speaking back and forth: therapeutic, meditative, brain love.
Warren Neidich was trained in fine art, architecture, and medicine. In the past five years he has used texts, neon-light sculptures, paintings and photographs to create cross-pollinating conceptual works that reflect upon situations at the border zones of art, critical neuroscience and cognitive justice. He founded the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, of which he has been the director since 2015. He is a former tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he has been a visiting lecturer at Brown University, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, Princeton University, Sorbonne University, the University of Oxford, the University of Cambridge, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, among others. He is the coeditor of the three-volume collection The Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (2013, 2014, and 2017) and the editor of An Activist Neuroaesthetics Reader (2021).
Curated by Sol Hashemi
Associate Curator and Operations Director
Gallery Gachet thanks Canada Council, BC Arts Council, and the City of Vancouver: Arts, Culture & Tourism for their support.
