As a kid, Joel Hoyer snatched the National Geographies

As a kid, Joel Hoyer snatched the National Geographies as soon as the magazines dropped through the mail slot. Then secreted in his bedroom, he’d travel to new and wonderful places with each flip of the page.

Those mind trips to long ago civilizations and foreign locations shape the art that Hoyer creates today at his Apple Mountain studio near Linden.

His ritual baskets have a look of antiquity. They could be artifacts stolen from the monks who guard the caves along Asia’s old silk road or taken from a Navajo hogan or found in a burial vault of a long dead Egyptian noble.

The horsetail whisk in one basket could have adorned the standard of Attila the Hun; the dance stick in another might have been Waved by an African warrior. The clubs leaning against the wall may have been carried by a pre-Columbian raiding party of native Americans.

He readily acknowledges the effects of far away and long ago. “If they keep their eyes open, how can artists do anything but be influenced?” he asked, adding that television, at its best, brings the world into the living room with public broadcasting productions and network travelogues, specials and shows like Marlin Perkins’ Wild Kingdom . The electronic and print media are “so full of information, all at one time, from all over the world . . . Today, it’s so easy to be influenced by many different cultures,” Hoyer said, adding that art should reflect this “global dialogue.”

He noted that a University of California professor is searching for reasons behind the current resurgence of artists working with ritual objects, like his baskets, and other “religious-type things.” Some see this happening because of a mystical pull of the turning century as the year 2000 approaches, Hoyer said.

But his choice of art form comes from a conscious attempt to reestablish contact with the environment. “We’ve lost all of our connections with the earth, with the mother, with the universe, with life,” Hoyer maintained. “We’ve become parasites, and parasites ultimately destroy their host - and themselves.”

His baskets are a reaffirmation of mankind’s dependency on Mother Earth and a rejection of that role of parasite.

For three years, Hoyer has been creating ritual art, weaving rope into basket (Shajies as he looks out over LindertVoid orchards. He collects many of the feathers for his whisks from raptors left dead on the shoulders of 1-66 and Route 55, and he scavenges for the wood for his clubs and pounders in the path of power lines every fall as crews clear the utility company rights-of-way of interloping limbs and underbrush.

In the winter, he works in the studio, painting visions from his own personal mythology in egg tempera, often over gold leaf. This art is very small, very fragile and very precious. Unlike the baskets, the paintings are not meant to be stroked, rubbed and hugged.

“That’s probably another reason