Risk is centred on the Ara Tūhono – Pūhoi to Warkworth Project, a public-private partnership between the Government and private consortium, the North Express Group. Through a series of printed aluminium panels, Wagg depicts the physical infrastructure of the road alongside the corporate structure underlying the asset. As the story unfolds, Risk becomes mired in corporate obfuscation, as groups within the special purpose vehicle (SPV) formed to finance, design, build, maintain, and operate the motorway, engage in a process of ‘shifting and reducing risk’.

The exhibition commences with Epigraph adhered to the front window, a pronouncement sourced from ‘investorsforum.co.nz’, a company previously registered at the Gallery’s address. With this recent history as a starting point, four aluminium panels are arranged in the language of film analysis: Introduction, Conflict, Rising Action, and Climax, each panel producing further evidence within the abstracted dossier. Formed of photographs and textual records, the panels' surfaces are effaced with markings and scrapes, possibly signs of freight upon the road. Travelling along the iridescent surfaces of the aluminium, Risk becomes increasingly illusory, until finally, Climax concludes with the closed doors of Morrison & Co obstructing the artist.

Wagg’s fluency in film appears throughout, and the merchandise of cinema frames the beginning and end of Risk. The opening Title is announced as a digitally embroidered hat in a typographic form reminiscent of crew or unlicensed fan merch, while Resolution is a t-shirt imprinted with prophetic words from Southland Tales (2006). This latter merchandise concludes with a final dramatisation of ‘risk transference’, as a previously unaccounted-for protagonist enters the frame to upend the SPV, and perhaps, the motorway itself. “A pre- historical and deep-seated landslide has been activated,” warns a 2023 Waka Kotahi report disclosed through an Official Information Act request, as geographic forces collude to dismantle all attempts at risk mitigation and return the road to an unknown future.