We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Samuel Sauls. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Samuel below.

Samuel, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. We’d love to hear about a project that you’ve worked on that’s meant a lot to you.

Throughout the creative path I’m on, I’ve worked on and created a number of projects that really evolved my skills and capabilities as an artist. Up to this point in my journey, I still feel that the most meaningful project I’ve worked on to date has been my college Senior Capstone show and the work I produced as a result of it.

During my time at the University of West Georgia, I knew the show was something I would inevitably have to do so it was more so planning and conceptualizing what it would be. I initially started creating a few theses that could formulate the groundwork for the show, but I never anticipated in the early stages that it would be something heavily reflective of me. A lot of show theses that are made or used as a means to create work usually would lean towards a societal issue, construct, or personal storytelling. A semester prior to my show, I had really started to dive heavily into the ideas and concepts of Afro-Futurism. Among the many ideas I started culminating, it’s no surprise that the thesis centered around Afro-Futurism is the one that stood out the most to me. With this in mind, I took the route of misrepresentation and breaking down social stereotypes and expanded from there.

The basis of the work and the thesis is centered around creating representation in stereotypically unconventional spaces that “othered” black bodies/people not only exist in but love despite social stigma. Aesthetically, the work I created reflects y2k, skateboarding, grunge, and futuristic identities. The term “othered” meaning being different, an outlier, or simply away from typically placed social norms. What started as a template to break down these societal barriers and provide representation quickly became a show based on identity, purpose, and personal place in the world.

While going through the process of conceptualizing and making the show, I started to realize that this wasn’t just a topic I was interested in and wanted to showcase: It was a message and callout to myself and inner being. I hadn’t truly taken notice until I started to really get into the workings of the show that I was also struggling with personal identity issues that started to manifest as the show itself. Unironically, I also was struggling on creating the show all the way up to hanging it. I changed directions a few times, restarted visual concepts, project file errors, had enormous print complications for the posters, and almost completely lost/damaged some of my pieces in the process. It even got to the point where on the day of hanging, I had made myself physically sick from the stress and lack of rest from all the damage control I was doing. The way this also coincided and reflected onto myself is that I still hadn’t found my own identity at the time, despite all the interest and things I thought made me who I am. I unintentionally started doing just as much internal work as I did external work during this project creation and it really pushed me to look at myself and finally start to see my authentic self.

As a result, I named my show “Return to Planet Giz-MO” in reference to my artist name, Giz-MO, and the start of the journey back to myself and what that means to me. The biggest theme that came from all of this was the knowledge of “You are more”; meaning that you are more than what you or the people and things around you perceive you to be, being more than where you are currently in yourself & journey, and being more than your current life circumstances. For the first time in my creative pursuits, I felt like I created something with a much deeper meaning and impact than I’d ever created prior to this body of work that could resonate with people and help provide something to someone for them to identify with. The most meaningful part of all is that this project truly helped me find myself, my voice, and my own place in the world as I created something that reflected back to me in such a surreal and profound way that truly changed my life.

Samuel, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?

I am a Georgia-based artist who creates visual work that depicts investigations of Afrofuturism, metamorphosis, exploration of human thought, abstract ideas, and pure experimentation that is carried out by my own distinct conceptualization. From a business solutions standpoint, I create clean concepts and designs that benefit business’s ideas, brand identity, problem-solving, and projects. I am also a vocalist, musician, and currently teaching myself music production as a part of my endeavors to be a full fledged recording music artist.

I was born in Austell, Georgia in 1999 and grew up in Carrollton, Ga where I have cultivated my talent and power as an artist and visionary. I am a well-rounded, well-versed artist of a variety of mediums with Graphic Design taking the forefront as my primary studio practice. I started taking my artistic practices more seriously in high school, but didn’t truly start making strides until I started attending the University of West Georgia, where I received my BFA in Graphic Design and a minor in Marketing (Dec. 2022). In terms of music, I’ve known since I was at least 5 or 6 years old that I wanted to go down the path of music long before I even ventured into the visual art world. I’ve been a self-taught vocalist for most of my life until I started taking lessons from my current coach in 2019, where I’ve also learned to play the piano. Now, I’m taking the time to combine my musical gifts in learning music production to engineer my own music.

As a designer, I provide a variety of services and products such as, but not limited to: logo design, flyers and posters, social media post and post templates, business cards, catalog/magazine work, postcards, brand identity, album covers, illustrations, and long-term projects. The problems that I solve for my clients include branding for their businesses, content creation for social media, template layouts, and flyers/posters for events.

What I’m most proud of is the connections I get to make with people and the opportunities they provide for me to improve while also being able to provide them work or resources that will directly benefit them. Because of this, the main things I want people who want to work with me, follow me, or support me is to know that I am constantly learning, teaching, and improving myself. I’m always wanting to build on the things I know how to do and want to do so that I can provide and be the best version of myself.

Is there a particular goal or mission driving your creative journey?

Absolutely, if not a few goals and missions that keep me driven. The main mission that drives my creative journey is that I want to touch people’s hearts and inspire them to be their true, authentic selves through the creative work that I create, no matter how that may manifest. Identity has more so than ever been at the forefront in our world to express individuality. A way to get closer to this on a global scale is giving people a space to unapologetically be themselves. Essentially, I want to provide ways or creative works that people can use for themselves to help them feel free from personal persecution of character, personality, identity, and the weight of other people’s perception.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

I believe for me one of the most rewarding aspects of being an artist or creative is the ability to translate an idea or feeling into a creative medium that couldn’t be translated better in any other form. There are certain feelings, thoughts, and ideas you want to convey as an artist, or in general, that words alone simply cannot fully capture the essence of exactly what you are wanting to communicate. The best way I can describe it is having the ability to communicate in a different language of sorts that reads as a variety of mediums, forms, designs, and more. For those who may struggle with words, visual and musical language (spoken lyrics aside) can be a very powerful means of communication and understanding. You can more accurately express yourself in a way that an essay, for example, may completely miss the mark on.

Contact Info:

• Website: www.gizmosfactory.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/gizmosplanet/
• Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/samuel-s-b5972725a