"The most difficult to reproduce would be both the Golfing Shoes and the Bowling Shoes." (Image courtesy of Juan Mejias.)

The Puerto Rican artist and inventor Juan Mejias is a dreamer who thinks up ideas for self-regenerating electric automobiles, guns that police can use to fire a tracking microchip into fleeing cars and functional shoes that are also sculptures. (He has created prototypes for his unusual footwear and is looking for venture capital to mass produce them.) I will likely never wear “shoendals,” but I still admire his diverse ideas. About.com interviewed Mejias. An excerpt:

“I got started with shoes looking for new and different types of sculptures. By using the shape of the shoes and altering it to look like something else, I managed to create a type of wearable art that did not eliminate the basic use of a shoe. I don’t wear them because the existing ones are prototypes to be mass-produced if and when I can get venture capital or a company interested in buying my designs. I have not set a price on them yet because my original intent for those designs is other markets. If there were a serious art collector interested in them, I would consider reproducing a pair or two. The most difficult to reproduce (therefore most expensive) would be both the Golfing Shoes and the Bowling Shoes. The least difficult ones would be The Bum and the Shoendals. I also have all those designs and some new ones printed over socks. The CO2 brakes are gas powered hand-held brakes, which will stop my Race Car Shoes when they are being used as roller skates.”