After Hours, Art Begins
After seven years of building creative worlds for others, Studio After Six turns inward with YEAR AFTER SIX, a group exhibition where 35 artists reclaim the freedom to create beyond the brief, the deadline, and the working day.
Words Randolf Maala-Resueño
Photos courtesy of Studio After Six
September 2, 2026
Studio After Six Founders | Photos by Randolf Maala-Resueño
There is a particular kind of freedom that arrives when usefulness falls away.
The brief is finished, the client has signed off, the screen goes dark, and what remains is the quieter, stranger impulse to make something simply because it insists on being made.
YEAR AFTER SIX, a group exhibition by Studio After Six, gathers that impulse into form. Opening at Space Encounters Gallery on August 8, the exhibition marks more than seven years of the creative collective’s existence.
It is a return to the question that preceded the business: why create at all?
The answer is not singular. Across works by 35 participating artists, coherence gives way to multiplicity. Abstraction meets realism; meticulous images encounter unruly gestures; pastoral landscapes sit beside graphic systems, mechanical forms, intimate figures, and technological curiosities.
The exhibition refuses the comfort of a collective aesthetic. Its unity is found instead in difference.
This distinction feels especially resonant for Studio After Six, whose members built their professional lives around communicating ideas for others. YEAR AFTER SIX turns that practiced eye inward.
Here, skill does not have to perform. Images can be excessive, playful, unresolved, tender, or strange. They can wander.
For co-founder Emma Dooc-Santos, that wandering is a return to the “childlike wonder” that first animated the founders as Fine Arts students.
The collective may have matured into business owners, but the desire to create for oneself remains stubbornly intact.
Co-founder Gabbi Reyes-Banaria sees that persistence as equally communal. Industries change. Technology changes. Clients change. What survives is the “fighting spirit” of creatives and, crucially, their willingness to care for one another.
That spirit is palpable in the exhibition’s very premise. These artists are not gathered to demonstrate sameness, but to reveal what happens when individual practices are allowed to occupy the same field.
A tender portrait can make a machine feel bodily. A familiar object can become uncanny. A dream can estrange an ordinary room enough for us to see it anew.
For Studio After Six, the exhibition also gestures toward what comes next: a broader creative community, deeper collaborations, advocacy through its partnership with MBrace Project, and more opportunities to create beyond commercial briefs.
After seven years, YEAR AFTER SIX becomes a proposition. Work does not end when the clock strikes six. Sometimes, that is precisely when another kind of work begins.
Pause, clock out, and experience after-hour art with YEAR AFTER SIX, on view at Space Encounters Gallery from August 8 to 31. For more information, follow Studio After Six on Instagram.
