Spencer Finch, Fathom

For his debut with the gallery, Finch has a devised an installation meditating on the different meanings of the word fathom. The work is made up of the physical remnants left over from the artist's reenactment of Henry David Thoreau’s 1846 survey of Walden Pond, in which the author used a demarcated length of rope to plumb the water's depth (among other definitions, a fathom is a nautical unit for measuring the same in six-foot increments).