Unless you create a reference manually from the control the only way to get the reference is to use the front panel controls property AFAIK, however - extracting the reference to a specific control from that array is easy. If you know the index just wire the array to an index array function and give it that index...if you only know the label of the control read the label.text property of the references, search for the index of the name...and wire that index to an index array function with the control references array as input - voila, you have the specific reference you needed.
The retrieval of the reference array and the name array may be effective to only do once and then keep them in shift registers. If you make a functional global that take a name as input and give out the reference; you can access them globally. Add a VI name to the search input and you can have the functional global serve references the controls of multiple panels.
