Lilli Mathod
‘DayTime’(2020)
Video
1 minute, 39 seconds
The relentless looping of life in domestic isolation is mimicked and magnified in Lilli Mathod’s video work ‘DayTime’. In this quasi-morning TV show, our host Carol Smith (played by Lilli, who also directs and produces the video) entertains us from the comfort of her home, surrounded by plants, cleaning appliances, DIY tools and an arsenal of dressing gowns and hair curlers. A product of the chaotic emptiness of spending too much time alone, Carol adopts the guise of various ‘experts’ – fashion guru, fitness coach, chef, Agony Aunt, sex therapist – who in other circumstances might steer our increasingly discombobulated lives back on track. Carol’s expert guidance, comfortable trappings and individualist existence cannot cannot ward off the spiritual and emotional poverty of isolation, though, and so we join her on a comi-tragic cycle of boredom, inertia, mania, despair and delusion. The ‘theme tune’ for ‘DayTime’ was composed by musician Jackson Mathod and mixed by audio artist Jack Wolff; its unwavering jauntiness as we loop through three opening title sequences provides the perfect soundtrack for Carol’s descent into chaos.