Every day, visitors to the Gregg Museum of Art & Design are able to experience a variety of artwork, such as sculptures and paintings. One of their current exhibits, “All the Possibilities of Sixteen,” features art from North Carolinian artist Vernon Pratt. The exhibit, notable for its large size, encompasses a variety of aspects and meanings.

Pratt is an artist who started his career at Duke University and later transferred to the San Francisco Art Institute. He returned to North Carolina in 1964 to teach drawing and painting as a professor at Duke. During his time there, he also created various pieces of art that show his development from an early figurative-naturalist style to a mature style called “systematic abstraction.” He created these later pieces through the 1970s, using mathematical formulas.

“[The exhibit] represents one phase of the kinds of things he did,” said Roger Manley, the director at the Gregg. “He was a jazz musician, and very interested in all the variety that he can squeeze out of a musical instrument that has a limited number of notes, or all the imagery you can squeeze out of the shades of black and white.”

Pratt is an artist that puts a multitude of possibilities into perspective. His work “All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)” represents just that – every single way anyone can fill up a square of sixteen parts. The exhibit shows all the possible unique arrangements of black and white tiles in a 4-by-4 area of squares, utilizing a total of 256 canvases that encompass nearly 2000 square feet of wall space. In total, it took over two years to create, and the exhibit was completed by Pratt on Oct. 20, 1982.

“A lot of people can underestimate how many possibilities there are of things like this,” said Anna Chernikov, a third-year studying computer science. “It’s really crazy to see them in person like this. There are almost a million tiny squares.”

The representation of a simple task, such as filling in a 4-by-4 square, is a new form of art that doesn’t present artistic ability, but presents a creative interpretation of art. This particular piece shows that even if you’re doing something as simple as filling up a square, there are so many other ways to achieve that same result.

“In this case, Vernon Pratt intended to create a way of experiencing something close to infinity, by taking a minor example to show something very complicated from something very simple,” Manley said.

“All the Possibilities of Filling in Sixteenths (65,536)” can be a piece that is interpreted in any way imaginable and shows that art itself can have many possibilities of interpretation.

During the viewing of this piece, an original musical composition called “Denominators” by Rich Holly, the executive director of Arts NC State, is played in the same room. This piece represents Holly’s viewpoint on Pratt’s adaptations of jazz music and mathematics.

“I was familiar with Vernon Pratt’s work, which basically falls into two categories, one of which is math and the other is jazz,” Holly said. “So for me, rhythm is very mathematical, so I thought about the mathematics sequencing that went into the painting, then applied that into several segments of the composition. I also thought of Vernon Pratt; besides his painting being in a jazz category, at times he himself was a jazz saxophonist, so I considered jazz elements as well. By combining jazz improvisation and mathematical computations of sequences, that’s how the piece was put together.”

The addition of music to the exhibit gave an extra layer to the experience of viewing it by allowing the audience to use more than just one sense.

“I think involving more senses made it a more complete experience,” Holly said. “To me, it’s like when we’re outdoors in nature; not only that, we are going to see plants and wildlife and sky, but if you pay attention, you will also be hearing the sounds of leaves rustling in the wind, or the squirrels running along the grass, or birds chirping or whatever makes for a visual, and the oral makes for a more complete experience.”

The sheer number of possibilities that Pratt shows in his work represents the variety of combinations possible in a limited space.

“It reminds me of my major,” Chernikov said. “ ‘All the Possibilities of Sixteen’ is like bytes, in honor of all the possibilities of two bytes I guess. It’s amazing because it takes him so long to do this but then code takes a few seconds.”

Just as this piece visualizes the immense number of combinations that can be derived from a singular task, there are a vast number of interpretations that can come from one idea. An idea isn’t just a made-up thought in someone’s head, but a thought that can be interpreted in a monumental number of ways by hundreds of people.

“It’s not just an art piece for art lovers, it’s a kind of art show for people who like to think,” Manley said.

This piece was put up in order to remember Vernon Pratt and all the incredible interpretations of art.

“This artist is a major North Carolina artist who had an unfortunate death in a bicycle accident and never achieved recognition in his own lifetime,” Manley said. “This is certainly his most ambitious piece, and so I felt like we needed to celebrate this largely unknown or underappreciated artist that has never had a major museum exhibition.”

“All the Possibilities of Sixteen” will be exhibited at the Gregg Museum of Art and Design until Feb. 10, 2019, during normal museum hours. Admission to the Gregg is free to the public and is open on all days of the week except Mondays.