Introducing our Intern!

Service and providing potential clients and customers with testimonials is one of the best ways to market.

Hey there y’all! My name is Micah Franklin and I’ll be interning with Rural Experience Collective this summer and part of this fall! I’m so excited to be working with you guys as I’ve been a part of what the collective has been doing for a little bit now and my own (relatively) rural upbringing has had a major impact on both my practice and life! I was born in Augusta Georgia, and lived there for a large portion of my life until moving to (what I considered) rural Thomson Georgia! I fully thought that I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, but upon coming to MCAD and meeting folks who grew up in towns of 600, I now consider Thomson to be the big city with its population of 6,000. That said, I did still grow up tramping through the woods all throughout middle and high school and somehow made it through un-snakebitten (y’all minnesotans don't realize how lucky you are). My exposure to the environment in this way led to a desire to explore, observe, and commune with the world around me in a more intentional way than I was raised, both ‘inside’ of nature and ‘outside’ of nature (whatever inside/outside means, is, or is drawn). My family was also largely raised in the rural southeast (stretching from Louisiana to North Carolina) and much of that culture, and its various expressions, is embedded in the way that I express myself. My practice draws from the christian traditions in which I was raised, namely the southeastern pentecostal Church of God, and the plethora of both complications and community that surrounded me growing up because of this. When first beginning my artistic practice, I exclusively painted, and while I still love painting to this day, I couldn't stop myself from becoming bored with the (literal) two-dimensionality of it all. Shortly after attending MCAD I began experimenting with installation which has lead me further down the road to an interdisciplinary practice incorporating aspects of installation, sculpture, sound, video, and painting. can’t wait to continue to be a part of REC and to be more hands on and engaged in the collective as I intern this summer!

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Much love!

Micah Franklin

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