So holy cow I finally got it. Gee that took way longer than needed. lol.

So the .RefersTo is exactly what I needed, but I had to strip out the ="" from the text and then assigned to a variable. not sure if there's a cleaner way, but this worked well for me:

strObject = Replace(Replace(ActiveWorkbook.Names(UCase(Replace(strRNG.Text, " ", ""))).RefersTo, """", ""), "=", "")
ActiveSheet.Shapes.Range(Array(strObject)).Fill.ForeColor.ObjectThemeColor = msoThemeColorAccent2