SYNC Gallery is pleased to present Artistic Journeys, a new two-person exhibition featuring the work of painters Johanna Morrell and Elvi Bjorkquist.

August 20th - September 13th, 2026
OPENING RECEPTION: FRIDAY August 21, 2026, 6 PM to 9 PM

This year's Artistic Journeys went in a different direction from last year, but the work still reaches for something that can't quite be said in words. Each piece holds a complicated feeling inside a symbol, something you understand not through logic or argument, but through a kind of immediate recognition, an intuition.

That's what non-discursive art does. It doesn't state facts. It gives shape to feelings and meanings that resist being spelled out. Abstract art builds an expressive symbol, and you grasp it in a flash of intuition rather than working it out step by step. A painting becomes a symbol of feeling. It makes an inner state visible, gives it a form you can actually see.

This comes from imagination, our ability to make images. People symbolize in all kinds of ways: through language, art, ethics, religion, philosophy, math. "Feeling" is just the word for that deeper layer of experience, what it's like to be a mind at work. All of it reaches outward, toward expression, toward symbols we can hold on to so that inner life becomes something shared.

We paint intuitively. We don't know where a piece is headed until we're in it. Layer by layer, until something in the image finally demands your attention. When we stop second-guessing and let the image come through, it feels alive, full of mystery, like it's trying to tell us something.