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, their work hovering between categories — absurd, offbeat, a little unsettling. Funny stuff happens when the familiar stops cooperating. 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.

Across the show, things refuse to settle: distorted figures, genres pushed until they give gravitas. Jake Longstreth's paintings observe our casually unremarkable exurban environments, granting strip malls and parking lots attention. Joe Sola's practice traffics in conceptual slippages and deadpan humor, here applied to 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. But what am I? Objects masquerade as images, ceramics behave like paintings, sculptures become architecture. Nothing here is only what it looks like.