Joe Sola, Birdhouse, 2026, Oil on linen, 28 × 22 inches, 71.1 × 55.9 cm

I Know You Are But What Am I ? is La Loma's summer show, bringing together sixteen artists working across painting, sculpture, and ceramics. The exhibition features Rebecca Brown, Edgar Bryan, Paul Davies, Kyle De Lotto, Ryan Dobrowski, Sylvia Fernandez, An Hoang, Raina Lee, Jake Longstreth, Jared McGriff, Dave Muller, Jude Pauli, Cindy Phenix, Aaron Michael Skolnick, Kansas Smeaton, and Joe Sola.

The show deals in funny stuff: subjects that tease the familiar, distorted figures, genres pushed until they give, absurd views and unsettling combinations. Jake Longstreth's paintings observe our casually unremarkable exurban environments, granting strip malls and parking lots attention and gravitas. Joe Sola's practice traffics in conceptual slippages and deadpan humor, here applied to a painting of a primary-colored birdhouse that doesn't quite work. Jude Pauli's ceramic totems invent their own twittering, piecemeal logic. Kansas Smeaton's lush, Rococo-inflected paintings reclaim who and what gets to be the subject of opulence and desire — grapes suspended in pink ribbon and chainlink, sweetness pulled against restraint.

Elsewhere objects masquerade as images, ceramics behave like paintings, sculptures become architecture. A summer show for fans of strange and ridiculous beauty…..