SAN ANTONIO, TX.- Ruiz-Healy Art presents Where I’m Calling From: Jennifer Agricola Mojica, a solo exhibition featuring the work of San Antonio-based artist Jennifer Agricola Mojica. The exhibition will be on view at our San Antonio gallery from November 5, 2025, to January 10, 2026, with an opening reception on November 5 from 6:30 to 8:30 PM. A conversation between Jennifer Agricola Mojica and gallery artist Nate Cassie will be held on December 6 from 1:00 to 3:00 PM. Where I’m Calling From: Jennifer Agricola Mojica marks the artist's third exhibition with the gallery and her first solo exhibition with Ruiz-Healy Art. Where I’m Calling From explores personal narrative, fragmented memory, and art-historical dialogue through a dynamic oil painting process in which objects and figures walk the line between abstraction and figuration.
Jennifer Agricola Mojica is an artist and educator based in San Antonio, Texas, whose work explores themes of transience, time, and fragility as a way to digest personal experiences and larger societal issues. Her oil painting practice unfolds through multiple stages, involving layering, shaping, and dismantling the compositional space; visual planes, figures, and objects are interrupted and disordered. Her work often reflects her experience as a mother of two, exploring the shifts, realignments, and moments of parenting. Ultimately, she hopes her work offers “a quiet place to rest among chaos.”
The oscillation between the legible and the obscured is integral to her work. Agricola Mojica employs traditional media with a distinctly experimental hand, allowing forms to emerge and dissolve into surfaces that resist singular interpretation through multiple layers of paint. The final works resolve as paintings that hold tension between the intimacy of figurative and the ambiguity of abstraction. Her paintings are not static representations, but temporal accumulations —records of interruption, repetition, and rediscovery. She begins with intuitive, gestural marks and builds dense surfaces through color, form, and distortion. Much like flesh or skin, these layers simultaneously obscure and reveal what lies beneath, forming a visual history that reflects her evolving inner life and maternal experience.
Symbols in Agricola Mojica’s work are repeated to the point of exhaustion throughout multiple compositions and bodies of work. The symbols include houses, birds, and plants, and some serve as stand-ins for larger societal issues. The artist explains, “I deconstructed my students’ vanitas still-life, pulling aside one of the props – a black crow. I used it for a small painting demo and then became fixated on it for several paintings. The crow became a powerful image for me. In all my paintings, forms, figures, and objects are covered, buried, or obliterated.”
“In Rabbit, the figure began with gestural marks and gradually emerged through overlapping shapes. Baroque still life elements appear and recede, pressing up against contemporary painterly approaches. The figure reaches for a steak but can’t touch it. She shouldn’t or couldn’t have this desire. This piece, like many others, is a conversation between conscious intention and unconscious longing.” - Jennifer Agricola Mojica.
The artist draws on themes and subjects relevant to the Bay Area Figurative School, including subjects such as the figure, still life, and landscape. In Do You Want to Go or Don’t You?, Agricola Mojica appropriates Elmer Bischoff’s Two Figures at the Seashore; Bischoff, a pioneer of the post-war Bay Area Figurative Movement, merged the gestural immediacy of then-prevailing abstract expressionism with figurative and narrative subjects. Much like Bischoff, she draws from visual memory and metaphysical sensations in composing her pictures, which include unspecified interiors and figures.
