Catch of the Day

There’s a famous market in a city on the west coast where, during operating hours, you can watch men in blaze orange bibs throw cold, dead fish over the counters at each other in a high-stakes game of catch. It is a somewhat obnoxious display, but one that makes the tourists giddy and, I guess, puts the crowd in a spendy mood. Crowds will gather on a weekend afternoon, clogging the spaces between belly-up crustaceans and open-mouthed trout, in hopes that a fourteen pound king salmon might soon sail over their heads. The catch–well, the other catch–is that someone needs to order a fourteen pound salmon for the men in orange bibs to throw it from one end of the shop to the other. Without this critical element of demand to their bountiful supply, the shop is just a place to buy fish you then take home to cook–no showmanship necessary. 

If you are a tourist waiting for someone who isn’t staying in a hotel to order a fish that the men in bibs will launch like a floppy, wet torpedo at one another, I guess it makes sense to linger in the market. So when Michael Laurito, a printmaker and the artist of Husks at Grove Gallery, told me that this exhibition was born from the desire to turn his studio into a fish market–an icy, oily, glass-eyed and slick-scaled bazaar–I was puzzled, primarily, as to why someone would be compelled to recreate this environment. I have found that most printmakers are particular artists, with expensive tools, time-consuming processes, iterative methods that depend on the source material upholding. None of this seems compatible with the damp decay of the pescatarian business. For Laurito, that’s the point. 

Just a few years out of MIAD, this early solo show is a cohesive sampling of this emerging artist’s conceptual thesis and material interests. Laurito has managed to sustain a desire to re-create the strange beauty of a fish market within another strange beauty that is collography, a printmaking method that combines additive and subtractive processes, without widening the scope too far. Limitations are apparent in these works, and such constraints often serve as a driving force to push material exploration into a trademark methodology. For one, Laurito has created his own substrate. Rather than draw or carve his aquatic images on expensive sheets of Calson, Lautito makes his own paper pulp and overlays the wet material onto the inked plates with the image. When the material dries into a texture that resembles a barbed and raggedy pulp, it retains the form and the ink transferred from the plate in its fibrous surface. The image “evolves” between forms. Not unlike the sockeye evolves from plain gray fish to demonic hell creature as it spawns.

There is still some work to be done, however. It’s too early to say whether Laurito will continue to refine his approach to collography, or if this is one technique in a timeline of many others. Other elements both technical and conceptual are less precise, such as the way these works are displayed and why the thesis expanded to include non-commercialized specimens. At times I found myself wondering if the fish image before me was meant to be dead at a market or alive underwater. Certainly, the former is more conceptually interesting, but it seemed that the young artist couldn’t resist creating an image of a beautiful fish that, by most accounts, might be considered to live too deep (or be too strange or unappetizing) to commodify. It is far more intriguing to depict the death cycle of his subjects than how they appear before being wrecked by society’s insatiable and destructive hunger. In his best moments, Laurito’s images reminded me of Dia al-Azzawi’s works on paper–with pleasingly varied line quality and hashed textures that draw the viewer in a little deeper. 

There’s still time left to see the show, and time to watch the artist evolve in his methods and considerations before he reaches name recognition. But that’s the best part about seeing shows by emerging artists at places like Grove. You can get it while it’s fresh.

Michael Laurito, Husks

Grove Gallery

Until February 21, 2026