“I represent the silent life happening around me using human/animal hybrids. I use the animal head as an expressive tool, something between a mask and a caricature that exaggerates inner features. I combine it with the silent language of our body and the cultural codes of fashion in order to portray specific individuals, the subcultures they belong to and, ultimately, the common habitat we all share. Sometimes I like to group characters together to best describe their isolation, making the individual stories sharper by contrast. Different origin, class, order, family, genus and species clash, coexist and reinforce each other within familiar dioramas. They mirror the theater of random interactions we experience everyday as our brain and eyes constantly scan surrounding faces, clothes and postures to guess personalities and predict actions that might affect us. Sense of humor softens the harsh edges of judgment and is the result of a compromise between necessary distance from what I comment on and the feeling of complicity from fully belonging to it, all flaws included.” - Alessandro Gallo "Gently Down the Stream" is a depiction of a seemingly relaxed setting —a half-human, half-bird couple sitting on a couch across from a note-taking frog-woman. Closer examination reveals the avian couple’s wedding bands, a box of tissues residing on the table before them. Apparently a scene of counseling in progress, their close proximity to each other masks a potentially great emotional distance that is currently trying to be bridged. The work is based on Gallo and his ex-wife going to marriage counseling before their divorce. It is about how hard it is to communicate in-depth, expressed through the different animal natures of the three characters. The title adds the idea of a strong, unstoppable current moving us all.