Picnic for a N(n)ervous System
July 11–September 20, 2025
Artist Talk July 11th, 4pm
(T)he subject who projects the image is the owner of the tools of production and the workable materials needed. The modality of the imaginary is that of potentiality; it only becomes the modality of unreality if the individual is deprived of access to the conditions of realization.
—Gilbert Simondon, Imagination and Invention
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.
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 pathological embodiment 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
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 colour translation is like a neural massage, creating parallel patterns speaking back and forth: therapeutic, meditative, brain love. Von Coffin holds an MFA from Yale University and BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions include CoCA in Seattle (2024); the Bellevue College Gallery in Bellevue, WA (2024); and Galerie Dengyun in Shanghai (2023).
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 work has been exhibited internationally including the Whitney Museum of American Art, MOMA PS1 as well as the Venice Biennial, 2019. Recent awards include Getty Research Institute Award, Hauptstadtkulturfond and Siftung Kunstfond Neustart Kulture prizes (2020). Neidich founded the Saas-Fee Summer Institute of Art, of which he has been the director since 2015. He is 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 Press, Athens. He is a former tutor at Goldsmiths, University of London, and he has been a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Columbia University, Sorbonne University, the University of Oxford, the University of California, Berkeley, and the University of California, Los Angeles, among others.
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 generous support.
