Picnic For a N(n)ervous System: Von Coffin & Warren Neidich
July 11–September 27, 2025
Curator’s Tour - September 27, 1pm.
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, a smorgasbord of modes of thought.
Brochure available here and VPL Reading List available here.
Von Coffin works in sculpture, painting, and food service. They carefully translate the hues and sheens of jellybeans, marshmallow Peeps, and snack foods into their paintings and the blocks inserted into their sculptures. 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? Coming out of the tradition of the Chicago Imagists, Coffin continues their investigation of bright colors, symbolism, and distorted stylized comic depictions to merge outsider art, art history, and the urban. Von Coffin is a member of the Seattle artist-run space, Specialist, and runs an experimental sculpture park on their family’s farm in Redmond, WA.
Warren Neidich was trained in fine art, architecture, and medicine. He is a wet conceptualist—an alternative historical thread of conceptual art Neidich has identified in contrast to the “dry”—engaging emotion, colour, material, humour, and activism in an age of cognitive capitalism. His professional and theoretical contributions are an important aspect of his art practice. Neidich founded the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, of which he has been the director since 2015. He is the editor of the three–volume collection the Psychopathologies of Cognitive Capitalism (2013, 2014, and 2017). The fourth edition of Neidich's Glossary of Cognitive Activism was recently published by Eris.
Coffin and Neidich’s artworks operate on individuation and becoming, unblocking what Gilbert Simondon calls the Image Cycle in Imagination and Invention—a developmental process in which images and objects are phases of a cycle of anticipation, experience, systemization and ultimately the invention of a solution to a problem of life, starting the cycle anew. If halted, tensions build, reaching a point of pathology akin to what is explored in the emerging Ecological–Enactive model of disability, where health is seen as the ability to ‘transcend what in the current situation is experienced as normal in readiness for (instead) a near open-ended number of other possibilities that may lie on the horizon.’ Individuals can lose the ability to invent potential new actions, what J.J. Gibson terms “affordances” within ecological psychology. In our current time of social media, crisis upon crisis, neuromarketing and algorithmic mediation, our once meandering paths of thought have been forcibly rerouted to build the transcontinental railways of our age.
For Evan Thompson, “cognition is not the grasping of an independent, outside world by a separate mind or self, but instead the bringing forth or enacting of a dependent world of relevance in and through embodied action.” Von Coffin and Warren Neidich build a neural diverse future, innervating neglected and forgotten zones; biologically, psychologically and socially. These artworks break the spell of a stuck and homogenized rational mental model, helping each of us to discover our own affordances—to enact a society in which all have reclaimed the very processes of action and realization, thereby reconnecting our collective guts, brains and hearts.
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 generous support.
