Spoleto doesn’t officially start until Friday, but tonight you’ll find a handful of preview shows, a festival eve concert, and several art openings. Below are the galleries hosting receptions tonight, but don’t forget about the other exhibits that have already opened that are still on view, like Jason Hackenworth at Redux, Carol Ezell-Gilson at the Dock Street Theater, Art and Music in Times of War on the USS Yorktown, and Manifesting Memory at the Art Institute (you can find a full list here).

When someone dies, those left behind are said to go through five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. In her 1969 book On Death and Dying, Elisabeth Kubler-Ross wrote that these stages are not chronological, and that people coping with loss can cycle through various stages or get stuck in one stage or another. But what happens when a death is unexpected or comes too soon? Do those left behind ever reach the final stage, or does the grief stay with us forever?

In Return to the Sea: Saltworks, Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto uses salt as part of his healing process to grieve the loss of his 24-year-old sister to brain cancer. Her death in 1994 inspired Yamamoto’s artistic exploration with salt. In his large-scale installations, he gives the unspeakable a shape.

Motoi Yamamoto shifts his weight on the mat he is kneeling on, sitting up from his work and surveying the mammoth design on the floor of the gallery. The 46-year-old Japanese artist wears all black, wire-rimmed glasses and socks with five toes. He blows out a breath and hunches over his work, tilting a bicycle squeeze bottle to draw a curlicue pattern on the floor with a trickle of table salt, like a baker adding piping to the rim of a cake.

The work expands, inexorably, slowly, until its large design is discerned.

“Return to the Sea: Saltworks by Motoi Yamamoto” opens at the Halsey Institute of Art, the latest of Yamamoto’s full-scale installation pieces that have appeared across the world, and once before at the Halsey, in 2006.

If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? That old question implies that one wouldn’t occur without the other, and grants the listener a role of importance in the process. Ephemeral art is defined as “lasting only a short time,” and like that proverbial tree, depends on the viewer to be seen. A well-known example of ephemeral art is the Tibetan sand mandalas. In Saltworks: Return to the Sea, Motoi Yamamoto doesn’t mind the impermanence of his work and says it’s the process that matters.

We stopped by the Halsey Institute this morning to see artist Motoi Yamamoto putting the finishing touches on his site-specific installation made entirely of salt. He’s spent the last two weeks using the main gallery floor as his canvas to create an intricate labyrinth. Guests are invited to walk around but not within the installation, and platforms have been built to allow for a bird’s eye view.

Return to the Sea: Saltworks opens on Thurs. May 24 from 5-7, but we encourage you to stop by now when you can see Yamamoto in action, squeezing salt from a small ketchup bottle. We hear the opening reception will be Japanese-themed, complete with sake, Japanese beers, and maybe even sushi.

The visual arts offering is the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art’s show by Motoi Yamamoto, who uses salt to create large-scale art installations that resemble — depending on how you view it — lace, waves or mazes.

The Charleston installation won’t be completed until the night before the festival opens, because Yamamoto works painstakingly sitting on the floor to create patterns for the installation. But Yamamoto sees his work as a form of meditation.

Even the most dedicated student might struggle through a graduate-level Shakespeare seminar. But for poet Emily Rosko, it’s where she found the inspiration to write her latest book.

Now an assistant English professor at the College of Charleston, Rosko was working toward her PhD in literature and creative writing at the University of Missouri when she started writing Prop Rockery. Inspired by the language of the Bard and other early modern writers, she started a series of poems that play off of lines from those texts.

“I was being saturated in that kind of language that [Shakespeare] had, which of course is so wonderfully peculiar to our ears,” Rosko says. “And the energy of the poetry that emerged from his plays was something that sort of fueled my own writing at the time.”

Imagine you’re reading a story filled with quiet women surrounded by animals, little men with human bodies and elephant heads, and copper-and-ceramic horses that look a little steampunk, a little classical.

That, in a sense, is what looking at the work of Virginia-based painter and sculptor Aggie Zed is like. She seems to have tapped into some element of art-making that allows her to spark her viewers’ imaginations, igniting their own creativity. Zed has concrete proof of this, although she would never go so far as to call it that: A collector of Zed’s ceramic figures once sent Zed a story she had written using the little figures as characters.

Aggie Zed, whose work is currently on display at the Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art in Charleston, grew up here on Sullivan’s Island. The show, comprised of sculpture, paintings, drawings, sketchbooks and installations, had never before been seen before the much-anticipated opening, held on Friday, January 20.

The opening was attended by a crush of 800 people. The lecture, held the following day, was equally crowded. Originally planned as a gallery walk-through, it was necessary for attendees to line walls and sit on the floor, in order to have their burning questions answered by Aggie Zed herself. Fittingly, the first inquiry of evening regarded Aggie’s childhood on Sullivan’s Island and how that unique experience has come to influence her work.

The Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art is $10,000 richer, thanks to the National Endowment for the Arts. The organization’s Challenge America Fast-Track program awards grants to small and mid-sized arts organizations around the country, particularly places that bring the arts to underserved audiences. The Halsey is one of 162 winners in 46 states.

The grant will support a two-week residency and exhibition by Japanese artist Motoi Yamamoto, who’ll be visiting as part of the 2012 Spoleto Festival in May. Yamamoto’s project, Return to the Sea: Saltworks, will be a large-scale installation made out of salt. There will also be works on paper and an artist documentary created by the Halsey. The artist will participate in workshops, demonstrations, and artist talks that will be open to the public.