Image: Tom Thomson Art Gallery, Owen Sound
The Tom Thomson Art Gallery in Owen Sound, Ontario, is revisiting a 2004 exhibition with a photographic record of ‘Lines Painted in Early Spring’, a group show curated by Patrick Mahon for the Southern Alberta Art Gallery. The feature appears in the gallery’s August 27, 2026, weekly newsletter under its “Throwback Thursday” section, more than two decades after the exhibition’s presentation in Owen Sound.
According to the gallery, ‘Lines Painted in Early Spring’ was on a national tour when it came to the Tom Thomson Art Gallery in May 2004. The newsletter does not provide the complete list of participating artists or the exhibition’s full tour itinerary, but it identifies Mahon as curator and situates the Owen Sound presentation within a broader Canadian circulation of the exhibition.
The exhibition’s title was taken from William Wordsworth’s Romantic poem ‘Lines Written in Early Spring’. The gallery describes the poem as examining the opposition between nature and culture, including the idea that paradise is lost through human mistakes. That literary reference supplied the conceptual frame for the exhibition, linking its title to questions about the relationship between the natural world and human intervention.
The newsletter highlights Ben Reeves’s ‘Work Space’ installation view from 2002–03. The work is identified as being made from extension cords. Photographs show the cords suspended in dense, brightly coloured networks, with loops and overlapping lines spreading through the gallery space. In several views, the installation forms a large three-dimensional field against white walls, while other works and a circular wall-mounted sculpture appear in the surrounding galleries.
The images emphasize the physical and spatial character of Reeves’s work rather than presenting it as a conventional wall-based object. The extension cords form tangled, curving structures that occupy the viewer’s field of vision and create changing patterns as the installation is seen from different angles. The gallery’s captions identify the work by title, date and material but do not offer further information about its dimensions, ownership or present location.
The archival feature is presented separately from the Tom Thomson Art Gallery’s current exhibition listings. The same newsletter announces ‘A History of Reverence’, running from September 19, 2026, to January 2, 2027, as well as current presentations including ‘Forecast – June to January’, ‘Markle – Content is Just a Glimpse’ and Michelle Peraza’s ‘Tú eres mi otro yo: Mundos, Mundo, Worlds’. Those listings concern the gallery’s 2026 programme; they do not indicate that ‘Lines Painted in Early Spring’ has returned to view.
The Tom Thomson Art Gallery’s newsletter identifies the institution as a collection-based public gallery in Owen Sound and includes collection references elsewhere in its programming material. Its current public hours are Tuesday through Saturday, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., with admission by donation. The remembered presentation of ‘Lines Painted in Early Spring’ remains documented through the gallery’s account of its May 2004 stop and the installation photographs of Reeves’s extension-cord work.
