Tracey Moffatt, one of Australia's best known contemporary artists, has been living and working in New York since 1997, and regularly returning to Australia.

Adventure series 2004 was photographed in Brisbane in July-August 2003 while Moffatt was artist-in-residence at the Institute of Modern Art. According to the artist, the series was inspired by 'Air Hawk and the Flying Doctors', an adventure comic strip she read as a child in Brisbane's Courier Mail newspaper, as well as the 1970s Australian television seafaring show The Rovers.

In Adventure series Moffatt translates her childhood memories of steamy glamour into a visually complex work indebted to these comic strip and television sources. She delights in visual artificiality: the characters are costumed and made-up professionally, the backdrops are painted and the images are manipulated with Photoshop.

Adventure series celebrates and parodies the popular culture genres which inspired it. This playful tribute, however, also clearly registers the seductive grip of the mass media in contemporary life and the power of its imagery.