Art comes in all forms, and if your knowledge of fine art is like mine (read: limited), then the old adage likely holds: “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Such proved to be my experience with Alyce Santoro’s depiction of a sailboat’s sails in her mixed-media piece entitled “Sonic Fabric,” now on display at the San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art (La Jolla location). Santoro created “Sonic Fabric” by weaving recorded cassette tape (50 percent) with other material. She says she was inspired to use this material for the sails by her family's use of cassette tape as telltales on their Lightning when she was a kid and by the Buddhist prayer flags she encountered in the mid 1980s during an internship in Santa Cruz, California.

“I grew up racing with my family," she says, "and I recall imagining that if the wind hit the telltails just right, I'd be able to hear whatever had been recorded onto the tape (Beethoven? The Beatles?) wafting out onto the breeze.”

While “Sonic Fabric” is a “quiet” piece (meaning no auditory sounds accompany it), it’s possible that those who are inspired by it may be able to discern riffs from “Here Comes the Sun” when the piece glitters just right in the sun. And for those who can’t quite make out this melody, Santoro claims that running a tape head over “Sonic Fabric” will reveal the sounds they contain. For more information on this piece, check out: www.mcasd.org/soundwaves/