Is it an art gallery? A museum? Or one woman’s elaborate invention? Visitors stepping inside the Studio Artbox installation at Liberty Station, called “Museo du Profundo Mundo presents Specimens & Renderings from the Carrera Expedition,” should prepare for a surprise. Fresh delights and discoveries, a garden of exotic — yet comfortable — wonders, will greet them as they progress from a wall of artfully arranged white mannequin arms to an about-to-burst human-size cocoon, to an antique glass case filled with six bubble-wrapped human figures entitled “Nuclear Family: The Ascent of Man” and then to a wall filled with oil paintings of pods. Welcome to the whimsical world of artist Lauren Carrera, where every artwork contains stories overlaid with more stories. Yet viewers must decipher these stories from their own observation and intuition, aided by the “field notes” introducing each set of exhibits in Carrera’s fantasy museum, created wholly from her imagination. It’s difficult to characterize Carrera’s art. The still-expanding collection of 75 to 80 “exhibits” includes paintings, dioramas, sculptures, assemblages and room-size installations, most created from found objects and many executed in multi-media. She calls her creation a “pop-up museum,” as transitory as the “pop-up restaurants” showing up in temporary spaces and on food trucks. Her Carrera Expedition is on view in Liberty Station’s Building 194 through late spring. The longtime La Jolla resident decided to design and populate her own museum following a coffee shop conversation with fellow artists about the difficulty of getting their work shown in museums. Inspired by the East Coast natural history museums she haunted as a child and more recent visits to the Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, she pursued her fascination with early collections and natural history. “I started thinking about how museums got started from cabinets of curiosity,” Carrera said. “Who were these people? Where did the cabinets of curiosity come from? From the great explorers and people like Thomas Jefferson.” It took her about two and a half years to assemble the various objects needed for her installations of “The Permanent Collection,” a dining room table set with distinctive serving  pieces and exhibits in glass jars, connected to an unusual chandelier hung with IV bags of saline solution. The dozens of found stuffed bunnies accompanying the Hopi-inspired “Trickster” hopped into her life from Goodwill and other thrift stores and yard sales. Other rooms are filled with paintings of landscapes and flowers, while another is set up as an aviary and another as a cityscape crafted from books. She had to invent her own formula for artificial “water,” complete with air bubbles, to fill the wall of plastic fish bags holding freshwater lures entitled “Safe Harbor.” Most of her titles have double meanings with underlying humor. “There are multiple interpretations for everything I do. There’s humor in everything I do. I think art should be beautiful and delightful first, then serious,” Carrera said. Carrera lives in La Jolla with husband Chris Schuck, headmaster of La Jolla Country Day School. Chris doubles as her gallery installer and assistant, but Lauren said she never expected to become an artist. As a child, she planned to become a physician. At Rutgers University, she turned to clinical psychology while also pursuing her interest in art, encouraged by her mentor, prominent Philadelphia artist Dan Wittels. “People (you encounter) can change the course of your life,” she said. She came to San Diego to work on her Ph.D., which she abandoned just short of her dissertation to become a full-time artist. Carrera now maintains studios in South Park and Portland, Ore. The Museo du Profundo Mundo, or Carrera Expedition, is located at 2835 Perry Road at the corner of Historic Decatur Road near the Corvette Diner. Hours are Wednesdays from 4 to 8 p.m., Saturdays from noon to 4 p.m., Liberty Station First Fridays from 5 to 8 p.m. and by appointment via her website. For more information and directions, visit www.studioartbox.org.