Where I'm Calling From: Jennifer Agricola Mojica

Ruiz-Healy Art is pleased to present 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. The exhibition marks her 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 wherein 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.”  Recurring motifs, such as birds, houses, and plants, have become integral to her symbolic vocabulary, first emerging in the studio during the COVID-19 pandemic's remote-learning era. These objects now serve as metaphors for protection, loss, safety, and failure, particularly the tender act of trying and sometimes failing to sustain life. Houseplants, often depicted mid-wilt or decay, reflect cycles of growth and surrender. 

The oscillation between the legible and the obscured is integral to her work. 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 the use of 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. Taking inspiration from the short stories of American writer Raymond Carver, many of the exhibition's titles borrow directly from his 1988 collection, Where I'm Calling From, echoing Carver’s focus on solitary, introspective characters. In parallel, Mojica’s compositions often center on singular figures or motifs, often isolated within dreamlike, ambiguous spaces that evoke vulnerability, solitude, and resilience.

Mojica’s figures—voluptuous, reclined, and abstracted—depart from traditional standards of beauty. They are real, powerful, and full of life, often portrayed in states of exhaustion or quiet resistance. Her transition into themes of rest and stillness speaks to the artist’s lived experience and her interrogation of femininity, selfhood, and care. In her recent work, Mojica references historical paintings, including Massacre of the Innocents by Nicolas Poussin, recontextualizing classical compositions to reframe the mother figure not as a victim but as a protector and caregiver. In Nobody Said Anything, she creates dialogues between appropriation and abstraction, using the language of Old Masters while disrupting traditional narratives of gender and power.

Where I’m Calling From ultimately explores what it means to navigate presence, change, and connection in an unstable and uncertain world. Through her abstract, layered, and spiritually charged paintings, Jennifer Agricola Mojica invites viewers into a world where nothing is fixed, where each mark, like memory, holds both loss and potential.