Alexander Russi is an observer: his most recent paintings depict the vegetables and pollinators blooming in the backyard garden he shares with his girlfriend in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, where he examines the plants and the small, fecund ecosystem they’ve created. In Russi’s paintings, the garden blossoms at Ferngully scale: leaves and petals are gargantuan, enfolding and swooping across each other in a tangled maze. Signs of the urban environment make an occasional appearance—a wrought-iron gate, a flash of brick wall—and debunk the apparent forest.

The city is no detractor from the magic; for Russi, every facet of the landscape is interconnected. While at Fountainhead’s Climate and Sustainability Residency, “one of the words that kept coming up in our studio visits was ‘entanglement,’” he says. “I was thinking about entanglement as a form of communication.” He describes one of his paintings, Transformer (2022), which renders a telephone pole stark and towering against a periwinkle sky. It’s easy to imagine what might be below: sidewalks traversed by neighbors, rows of stoops, the inherent interconnectedness of a community. “The telephone pole is a monument to that sense of entanglement—a broader sense of communication that involves this infrastructure.”

Here in Miami, Russi observed and painted mangroves (Brackish, 2023), their sturdy roots protecting the coast from storms, and an elevated midcentury home in the city’s Morningside neighborhood (Morningside, 2023)—its concrete stilts acting as protectors, too. “This way of looking,” he explains, “is sometimes just about being a neighbor, finding a connection through the world around you. I thought about how mangroves are at the forefront of where the water rises; that led me to the house painting, thinking about these water levels. When you invest in the way you look at things, you might see nature looking back at you, too.”