In this act of burial

In this act of burial

On exhibit June 20 to Spring 2026

In this act of burial is a public installation in service of exploring public memory, developed over the course of site visits, studio visits, and engagement with Regional archival material. In this act of burial is curated by independent curator Shalaka Jadhav, who locally, is a co-director of Textile, a hyper-local arts collective supporting writers and artists through mentorship, publishing, and curation.

Borrowing visual cues from wheatpasted panels and public notice boards, the installations on the lawns of the Regional museums (Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum, Schneider Haus National Historic Site, and McDougall Cottage Historic Site) occupy public space to nudge the project of public memory work beyond the walls of the museum. 

Between June 20 and September 21, 2025, In this act of burial features work by two multidisciplinary artists:

In using the kitchen table as a site for discussion, movement-based artist Kate Kamo McHugh is interested in questions of inheritance through the lens of motherhood. In collaboration with graphic designer Natalie Vuong, Kamo McHugh will explore the Region’s connection to Japanese-Canadians.

Conceptual lens-based artist and curator Maddie Lychek will be considering what it means to queer the archive through an intervention of finding herself in the archive and recontextualizing objects in the Region’s permanent collection.

In fall 2025, artist Meghan Harder will install a polyptych of images in the lightboxes at Schneider Haus National Historic Site. Through an artifact-responsive drawing practice of fraktur folk art, historically produced by early Mennonite settlers, Harder searches for ways to defamiliarize fraktur’s forms and meaning.

Experience Kate Kamo McHugh’s and Maddie Lychek’s work at Ken Seiling Region of Waterloo Museum, Schneider Haus National Historic Site, and McDougall Cottage from June 20th to September 21st, 2025. Explore Meghan Harder’s work at the lightboxes exclusively at Schneider Haus National Historic site later in 2025, continuing into spring 2026.

Presented by Textile in collaboration with the Region of Waterloo Museums and Archives at Ken Seiling Waterloo Region Museum, Schneider Haus National Historic Site and McDougall Cottage Historic Site.

Kate Kamo McHugh

Kate Kamo McHugh is a dance and theatre artist from the Region of Waterloo. Born and raised in Elmira, Ontario, she spent 10 years living overseas before deciding to call the region her home. Artistically, Kate is interested in exploring migration, belonging and the intersection of art and care. Recent highlights include creating with Dancemakers and CanAsian Dance, dancing with Tara Butler for Femme Folks Fest at the Centre in the Square, and performing with local theatre company Cosmic Fishing Theatre. She is currently working on Retracted, a collaboration with her spouse, documentary photographer Colin Boyd Shafer, and their two children, wherein they will travel to explore the spaces her grandparents were forcibly moved to during Japanese Internment. Kate is a graduate of the arts program at Eastwood C.I. and holds a BFA from Toronto Metropolitan University in Theatre Performance Dance.

Maddie Lychek

Maddie Lychek is a conceptual lens-based artist and curator. She works in video, performance and installation exploring how her body and its consumption can be used as a radical act of self-discovery. Lychek creates a tension between abjection and eroticism engaging with conversations around power and play. She has presented in venues like InterAccess and Xpace Cultural Centre and curated for Ed Video Media Arts Centre, InterAccess, and Platforms Project. Lychek worked as the Program Director at Ed Video Media Arts Centre and served as a board member of the Independent Media Arts Alliance. She is currently pursuing an MFA at the University of Waterloo.
Website: https://maddielychek.com/

Meghan Harder

Meghan Harder is an artist living in St. Catharines, Ontario, working in the areas of drawing, writing, sound, sculpture and installation. She received her MFA from the University of Guelph and has exhibited at Blouin-Division Project Space, Xpace Cultural Centre, Hunt Gallery, Xpace Cultural Centre, the Kitchener-Waterloo Art Gallery, Contemporary Art Forum of Kitchener and Area, The Plumb, and the Lincoln Museum.
Website: https://www.megharder.com/

Shalaka Jadhav

Shalaka Jadhav is a writer, researcher, and independent curator who grew up between cities in India, in Dubai, and near Ontario’s largest mall. Now based on Block 2 of the Haldimand Tract and Treaty 1 territory, their work explores spatial positionality, grief geographies, public memory, and queer ecologies as evidenced in exhibitions curated in Halifax, Winnipeg, Kitchener, Guelph, and Toronto. Shalaka has held roles at OCAD University and The Blackwood, and co-directs Textile, a hyper-local arts collective in Waterloo Region. As a 2025 Musagetes Fellow, they are developing place-based curatorial projects that explore publication as form. Currently, they are one of the inaugural Visiting Curators at the University of Manitoba School of Art Gallery. Trained as an urban planner, Shalaka has contributed to social innovation and climate resilience projects nationally and internationally, and worked in audio journalism, planning departments, and on rooftop gardens and farms. They’ll likely point out the names of “weeds” as you walk together, and will always order dessert.