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In "Eco-Tankers: An Exhibition," opening Sept. 5 at SUNY Oswego's Tyler Art Gallery, Oregon artist Bruce Conkle and students envision a future where humanity subsists on enormous floating vessels. "Eco-Tankers," along with "A Personal Landscape: Contemporary Art Quilts" and "Rocks and Rills: Nature Themes from the Permanent Connection," will run through Oct. 19 in Tyler Art Gallery. For more information, call 312-2113.

“Eco-Tankers: An Exhibition by Bruce Conkle” and “Rocks and Rills: Nature Themes from the Permanent Connection” will bring green views to SUNY Oswego’s Tyler Art Gallery Sept. 5 to Oct. 19.

The show of conceptual drawings and “eco-tanker ship models” by Oregon artist Conkle and students from age 6 through college level explores the issue of global warming and the specter of a future “watery world.” The exhibition correlates with “Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature and Climate Change,” this year’s Oswego Reading Initiative selection for summer campus-wide reading.

Conkle envisions a future of sailing behemoths, retrofitted oil tankers that are highly adaptable to temperature fluctuations, rising sea levels and changing precipitation patterns. Crops, orchards and forests could be grown on these ships by resident arborists, horticulturalists, beekeepers and others, he believes.    “Eco-Tankers” showcases the artist’s watercolors and drawings and an armada of suspended sailing ships constructed by students from grade school to college.

“Rocks and Rills,” a show of nature images from Tyler Art Gallery’s permanent collection, also will open Sept. 5. As a semester project, spring 2008 students in “Art 381: Contemporary Museum Issues” researched and wrote extended labels for this exhibition, which will feature works by James Gale Tyler, Lucien Pissarro, Charles Pollock and others.

The public is invited to an opening reception from 5 to 7 p.m. Friday, Sept. 5, with Conkle talking about the display at 6 p.m. Refreshments will be served, sponsored by SUNY Oswego’s Auxiliary Services.

“Eco-Tankers” and “Rocks and Rills” will run concurrently with “A Personal Landscape: Contemporary Art Quilts” in Tyler Art Gallery.

During exhibitions, SUNY Oswego’s Tyler Art Gallery is open from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. weekdays and 12:30 to 4:30 p.m. weekends. All gallery events are free and open to the public. For more information, contact the gallery at 312-2113.

Oswego Harborfest has announced that the popular 50-50 Raffle to benefit Harborfest will return in 2009.

Farnham Family Services, an Oswego-based substance abuse treatment and prevention center, is now selling tickets for its 2009 Changing Lives Raffle.

As this column goes to press the 152nd Oswego County Fair should be in full swing at Sandy Creek. During the previous week the Heritage building was stocked full with many new and unique exhibits. We even brought down a piano for some live music!